This research offers the perceptions of independent non-executive directors (INEDs) in Thailand of their roles and the way they cope with constraints such as family-concentrated ownership structures and asymmetric information problems. There has been scant prior research in this area. The researcher applied qualitative research techniques to understand what was in the interviewees’ minds. The semi-structured interview was employed because it allowed some flexibility while also providing some guidelines. The fieldwork data reveals that interviewed INEDs were aware of a board’s control role which, in theory, can be realised by nominating and remunerating top management; however, in practice they had no authority to do so due to the family-concentrated ownership of Thai firms. Ensuring compliance with laws and regulations was the actual controlling activity which they undertook. Another role perceived was a service role concerned with giving advice and counsel to management. Although the interviewees rarely got involved with planning and directing, they contributed their expertise to the board. Their service function also helped them to better fulfil a control role because an INED’s service role builds his credibility in the eyes of management. This allows them to gain access to better information about a company – a critical input of a control role. Therefore, a good relationship between executives and non-executives is an essential factor for INED’s effectiveness. i A proportion of outside directors on the board and a director’s independent background were not considered guarantees of board independence. Only an INED’s independence of mind matters. Such independence can be exercised by resigning in order to send a signal to the market and protect minority shareholders. The competencies and personal characteristics of INEDs and their motivations are other elements contributing to their effectiveness.

Competitive pressure and desire for success drive enterprises in general to involve in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities that are becoming increasingly significant in the rapid changing and globalising economic world. In addition, with the increased mobility of information and the global labour force, knowledge and experience can be transferred instantaneously around the globe; thus, any advantage gained by one company can be eliminated by comparative improvements overnight. Therefore, the only comparative advantage a particular company will face will be its process of innovation – combining market and technology know-how with the resourceful talents of knowledgeable labour to solve a constant stream of competitive problems- and its ability to derive value from information. In this context, internal and external knowledge acquisition, intra-firm knowledge dissemination and management decisions taken in response to the significant information generated and subsequently filtered became the key factors of entrepreneurial success. This thesis explores how market orientation, learning orientation and entrepreneurial orientation systematically contribute to and are sources of competitive advantage in growth-oriented SMEs. The objective of this study was to investigate the likelihood of a growth-oriented enterprise established in Atlantic Canada to be involved in knowledge acquisition and dissemination activities and to succeed conditional on numerous internal and external factors. A ‘mixed-methods’ research approach was used in this study, comprised of: 1) a web-based questionnaire to study the knowledge management process and other aspects of entrepreneurial success and 2) ‘semi-structured’ interviews with a sample of the responding entrepreneurs. The findings suggest that knowledge management practices: external acquisition, intra-firm dissemination and responsiveness, do vary across the levels of entrepreneurial performance among the Atlantic Canadian SMEs investigated in the study. Having a market orientation and investing in human resources of the firm were found to be critical drivers of innovation leading to potential competitive advantage.

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) has become an increasingly important initiative among organisations. The factors affecting adoption decisions have been well-documented, but there is a paucity of empirical studies that examine the adoption of e-commerce in developing economies in the Arab world. The aim of this study is to provide insights into the salient e-commerce adoption issues by focusing on Saudi Arabian businesses. Based on the Technology-Organisational-Environmental framework, an integrated research model was developed that explains the relative influence of 19 known determinants. A measurement scale was developed from prior empirical studies and revised based on feedback from the pilot study. Non-interactive adoption, interactive adoption and stabilisation of e-commerce adoption were empirically investigated using survey data collected from Saudi manufacturing and service companies. Multiple discriminant function analysis (MDFA) was used to analyse the data and research hypotheses. The analysis demonstrates that (1) regarding the non-interactive adoption of e-commerce, IT readiness, management team support, learning orientation, strategic orientation, pressure from business partner, regulatory and legal environment, technology consultants‘ participation and economic downturn are the most important factors, (2) when e-commerce interactive adoption is investigated, IT readiness, management team support, regulatory environment and technology consultants‘ participation emerge as the strongest drivers, (3) pressure from customers may not have much effect on the non-interactive adoption of e-commerce by companies, but does significantly influence the stabilisation of e-commerce use by firms, and (4) Saudi Arabia has a strong ICT infrastructure for supporting e-commerce practices. Taken together, these findings on the multi-dimensionality of e-commerce adoption show that non-interactive adoption, interactive adoption and stabilisation of e-commerce are not only different measures of e-commerce adoption, but also have different determinants. Findings from this study may be valuable for both policy and practice as it can offer a substantial understanding of the factors that enhance the widespread use of B2B e-commerce. Also, the integrated model provides a more comprehensive explanation of e-commerce adoption in organisations and could serve as a foundation for future research on information systems.

As external factors increasingly influence the way businesses operate, companies have to be able to adapt in order to cope with these external influences. They have to become agile and responsive to change in order to gain a real competitive advantage. However, most companies believe that they are unable to achieve this to their satisfaction. One of the main reasons cited is their inability to manage change effectively. The research summarised in this report identifies how the process of managing change can be facilitated and improved. It builds on the main concerns and issues identified in the change management literature and is supported with evidence from companies undergoing change. The research focuses, in particular, on best practice benchmarking, critical success factors for change, the role of corporate culture, understanding learning organisations and how to sustain change. Based on these research areas, two major developments are proposed to help organisations to manage change more effectively. The first method focuses on a benchmarking tool for change management. Formed from the actual practices of organisations who have managed change effectively, the tool provides a quantifiable way for companies to measure and improve their performance in change management. Its successful implementation in a number of different applications and levels, as demonstrated in the research, suggests that it could provide significant benefits to any organisation undergoing change. The second method focuses on sustaining long term successful change management, through more effective capture, sharing and transfer of knowledge within a company. This is known as corporate learning. A corporate learning framework, based on best practice, is proposed as a way forward for organisations to ensure that a holistic approach is taken when implementing corporate learning. Used correctly, these innovative methods provide mechanisms which can help any company undergoing change to improve the way in which it manages that change.

This Executive Summary is a summary of the author's Engineering Doctorate research and the application of that research. The Executive Summary has sufficient detail and description to be read independently from the other pieces of research, called submissions, to which this refers. In outline, the three areas of research arose from the three research programmes with which the author was closely involved. The first area of research involved the identification of critical success factors within customer-supplier relationships in the automotive industry. An extensive literature review was performed using Lamming's Lean Supply Model (1993) as a starting point. A number of gaps in the body of knowledge were identified and were grouped into five areas for the purpose of further research. One area was subsequently addressed as part of the second area of research. The second area of research was aimed at assisting small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in their use of the internet to improve their performance. A means of assessing the effectiveness of the operations of the SMEs was a critical part of this programme. A new tool called the SME (Operations) Assessment Tool, (SOAT) was developed because it focused on key business processes as the basis for assessment instead of the more traditional financial analysis. Having developed SOAT within the specific research programme, it was applied to three SMEs as a test of the methodology as a more general tool. Feedback from the three SMEs and those within the research programme showed that SOAT was straightforward to apply. The third area of research allowed the author to develop his interest in customer supplier relationships, as this was seen to be the main focus of concern within companies within the programme. A Memorandum of Understanding and Intent (MUI) was developed and justified, but was in the process of being applied by other researchers.

Increasing interest is being shown in performance measurement, in both the academic literature and by practitioners. When implementing innovative products, organisations are facing issues of how to measure and manage the performance of the products concerned and how to do so in a worthwhile way. Reviewing existing literature suggests that there has been limited research on the value of performance measurement and management processes and indeed little conceptual distinction has been made between performance measurement and performance management. A conceptual framework is developed, structured around concepts from the existing literature showing two ways of distinguishing performance measurement and performance management. Performance management processes are shown as broader than performance measurement processes and the influences of the processes on performance are also displayed, another way of differentiating between the two concepts. The framework provides a structure for a pattern matching analysis using empirical data. Empirical data collection involved four case studies, each focusing on a medical device being implemented in the UK public healthcare sector. Forty-six semi-structured interviews explored performance measurement and performance management processes in the implementation of the innovative products, as well as exploring the influences of those processes on performance of the innovative products. The findings from the thesis highlight key performance measurement and performance management processes that occur in the implementation of innovative products, finding that the two can best be distinguished by their influence, or lack of influence, on performance. Performance reporting is also highlighted as a key concept. The findings indicate that performance measurement and reporting processes alone cannot be expected to have an influence on performance, however if performance management processes occur too then they can.

This thesis is an empirical exploration of supply strategy content and process. The investigation uses a single-sector case study methodology to explore the scope of supply strategy content, the interaction between supply strategy content and context, and supply strategy process within four aerospace sector companies. The research also uses an extant Integrative Framework to subsequently identify the ‘modes’ of supply strategy process that best describe supply strategy process in the case studies. While the scope of supply strategy content suggested by the supply management literature is theoretically broad, supply strategy process is represented in the literature as chiefly derived from business / corporate strategy. Recognising that details of the processes / practices that create supply strategy and the scope of content within supply strategies have been under-explored empirically, this investigation seeks to contribute to a developing understanding of supply strategy content and process ‘in practice’ and in particular, the role of actors in supply strategy process - which is largely absent in related studies. The research contributes to existing knowledge by finding that the opportunity / autonomy actors have to enact supply strategy process is broadly determined by contextual factors. Furthermore, the investigation finds that supply strategy process, actors and context all have a moderating effect on the scope of supply strategy content. It is also shown that different actors engage in the formulation and implementation stages of strategy process. Finally, the investigation identifies one dominant ‘mode’ of supply strategy process and distinctive combinations of ‘secondary’ modes in each case study. For practitioners, this investigation illustrates that the opportunity and facility to think / act strategically in supply is dependant upon more than just resolve and motivation; it is the product of a complex interaction of strategy context, content, process and actors. The thesis concludes by making a number of recommendations for practice and by identifying opportunities for further research in this field.

Over the past 20 years, governments in many countries around the world have sought to implement governance mechanisms to measure and assess the performance of public service organisations. As a consequence, public service organisations, especially those considered as poorly-performing organisations, have been subjected to unprecedented pressure to improve their performance and sustain performance improvement as a continuous process. However, efforts of public managers to improve the performance of their organisations have been undertaken without “comprehensive theories and rigorous evidence on this issue” (Boyne, 2006: 366). This thesis takes up the challenge of providing robust evidence on the factors associated with the performance improvement of public organisations. We propose that the notion of organisational capabilities offers a promising way to meet this challenge. From this standpoint, this research sought to identify the organisational capabilities whose development and use explain a public service organisation’s ability to improve its performance and sustain good performance in the long run. The empirical analysis was conducted in a population of hospital trusts in England. We firstly applied longitudinal and comparative case studies method into two acute hospitals trusts: one case of a successful performance improvement and one case of less-successful performance improvement. The purpose was to examine how the development (or lack of) a set of capabilities over time accounted for the differences in the performance outcome and trajectory of the two cases. Our findings identified the following capabilities as advantageous for achieving a sustained performance: collective leadership; action-oriented culture; effective clinical-managerial relationship; supportive external context; performance / finance control capability; coordination capability of the key delivery process; sensing capability and learning capability. We then employed quantitative method over the population of acute hospital trusts in England to explore the relationship between complementarities of capabilities and performance. The results demonstrated that only when in combination does the presence of the capabilities yield positive and significant association with performance. In other words, the presence of the whole system of the capabilities increases the trusts’ performance, while partial presence of a set of capabilities is either not significantly associated with, or even detrimental to, the trusts’ performance.

This thesis presents why a new user-centred design process for eco-design would be beneficial and demonstrates how this could be done. The research produces a methodology for collecting and measuring behaviour information and a framework for assessing its impact. It explores the role of and effective introduction of information in the design process and finally concludes with the proposed design approach for reducing the environmental impact of products during their use. Utilising a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, energy models, observational studies, laboratory design experiments, participation research, product prototyping and industrial consultation, a comprehensive picture of designing for energy-efficient user behaviour is formed. It illustrates how behaviour information can be recorded and quantified, assessing the division between a product's intrinsic, technology-based, energy efficiencies and those that are deemed user-related. Finally, in conclusion this information is then used in a new design approach which proposes a framework for the effective and time-efficient design of products, producing a prototype design which achieves an ongoing 43% energy saving in user related losses.

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