Bill Fischer

International Institute for Management Development

At a recent Academy Meeting, a panel was convened to discuss the meaning and sources of scholarly impact, taking a primarily individual perspective to explore ways in which each of us can increase the impact of our academic research. The discussion centered on how to publish and get cited in top academic journals – certainly a cornerstone objective...

This paper reports on the application of Rickards' and Bessant's ‘Creativity Audit’ in 141 research and development units in the People's Republic of China during 1982 and 1983. The objective of the paper is multifold: 1) to employ factor analysis in order to determine key dimensions of innovative climate and through these to be able to reduce the...

The recent attention given to Strategic Alliances and Technological Partnering, in a variety of commercial and governmental contexts, has grown much faster than our detailed understanding of how such arrangements work. For some time, however, military agencies in the NATO countries have been involved in a number of high‐technology cooperative proje...

The paper is an account of the authors visit to the Peoples Republic of China in 1981. It shows how a highly centralised state deals with innovation, in this context innovation being equated with R&D. The first part of the paper deals with the way the responsibility for planning and execution of scientific and technical effort is distributed throug...

Technology transfer has received considerable attention from both practitioners and academicians over the past few years, yet little progress has been made towards establishing a solid conceptual framework for the topic based on empirical evidence. This article reviews the limited amount of multivariate empirical literature on ‘transfer processes i...

Managing a traditional team seems pretty straightforward: Gather up whoever's available, give them time and space to do their jobs, and make sure they all play nicely together. But these teams produce results that are often as unremarkable as the teams themselves. When big change and high performance are required, a virtuoso team is far more likely...

Los "equipos virtuosos" estan compuestos por los expertos más destacados en sus respectivos campos y se crean especialmente para proyectos ambiciosos o de gran proyección. Su estilo de trabajo tiene un ritmo frenético, siendo muy altos los niveles de trabajo y objetivos, así como los extraordinarios resultados que ofrecen. Pese a ello, los riesgos...

China's re-emergence has been treated mostly from economic and political standpoints. This article integrates these perspectives with a review of China's modern history of research and development (R&D). It starts with a brief retrospective of China's efforts in science and technology before the reforms of 1978. It then discusses China's principle...

No abstract available.

Competitive strategy can be influenced by technological change and technological innovation over time, a process we refer to as dynamic innovation. Using data from the computer modem industry, we examine the relationship between firm size and dynamic innovation. Innovation performance is represented by the technological performance of the outputs o...

New product development, specifically the ability of a company to develop products that outperform their competitors in the marketplace has been shown to benefit from the acquisition and use of external information. In this paper, we examine the relationship between absorptive capacity and new product development performance. Absorptive capacity is...

In the early 1980s, two ambitious projects were launched, with Western assistance, to bring the concepts of modern management, as it was known in the West, to Chinese managers. One of these initiatives was funded by the US Government, and was located in Dalian; the other was funded by the European Commission, and has evolved into China’s leading bu...

China today and its industries are in flux economically and socially, moving towards a market that is significantly different from that of the past 50 years. With the rising increase of the West's interest in China's economy, foreign competition from multinational companies has risen and led to a change of China's landscape of customers and markets...

Advanced processing technologies, managerial practices, and information systems have merged as vital elements of modern day production. It has been argued that these changes in practice and technology have yielded a strategic manufacturing environ-ment in the 1990s which is very different from that which existed in the 1970s and 1980s. Examines and...

Using new methods and data sources, this new study examines the relationship between firm size and technological innovation in the computer modem industry. The results indicated that, contrary to what might expected from prior research and anecdotal response, more innovative firms were generally larger than less innovative firms.

There is a widespread belief in the business community that firms can rely on the market for buying and selling technological opportunities. The argument is: with so much technology development going on in the world, ‘there must be somebody somewhere who has the technology we need.’ According to this belief, acquiring new technology just boils down...

The dynamic nature of information can prove troublesome to individuals given the responsibility for managing their acquisition and deployment. Not only is there stream of new products, but existing products are periodically enchanced to reflect technical advances, competitors' actions, or both. The net result is that the general manager and the inf...

The Chinese government has placed great emphasis on acquisition of foreign technology which would enhance the capabilities of existing enterprises. Yet China lacks many of the conditions which would make such transfers effective. The mere acquisition of technology does not assure the contributions sought. There must be a system for receiving the te...

Data collected from twenty-one firms were used to study the impact of organizational size and structure on the adoption of microcomputers in those firms. The results show that both size and structure had a significant impact on the adoption of microcomputers. Organizational size was measured as the organization's annual sales. The structural charac...

For more than a decade, China has been committed to a policy of opening greater economic relationships with the outside world. The ultimate objective of such a policy is to earn foreign exchange, obtain foreign technology and managerial expertise, and strengthen Chinese industry. Central to this policy is a shift from her traditional preference for...

Despite all of the attention that has been paid to the strategic concerns of more repetitive operational contexts over the past few years, almost all of the research on project management has remained focused on various aspects of network manipulation. For any project where the simple application of network techniques could be inappropriate or dysf...

Knowledge-intensive organizations, including R&D, must rely upon job design and motivational incentives for the majority of their efforts towards increasing productivity. Management-by-Objectives (MBO) is a popular technique which addresses both of these approaches. There is considerable debate, however, over just how desirable MBO systems are in R...

In a recent issue of Decision Sciences, Muhlemann, Lockett, and Gear [8] developed a multiple-objective, stochastic linear programming formulation of the multiperiod portfolio selection problem under uncertainty. The purpose of this note is to offer some extensions to their multicriteria approach which is otherwise viewed as an excellent attempt at...

The nature of coordination of practices between the headquarters and field operations has long been a matter of considerable importance to the management of research and development (R&D). When the firm performs R&D aboard, in foreign locations, the issue of coordination increases in significance. This article reports on interviews with 35 American...

El requisito fundamental para formar "equipos de virtuosos" es escoger a las personas con el mayor talento "alcanzable" y dejarlas que "deliren" hasta el límite de su capacidad. La creación de un "equipo de virtuosos" constituye la mejor forma de generar un cambio radical nutrido por nuevas estrategias, es la mejor forma de reinventar una empresa.E...