In this dissertation, I investigate how capabilities drive firm performance as an industry evolves. I show that in spite of significant research on firm capabilities, we do not understand whether technological capabilities continue to drive firm performance as an industry evolves or whether they become weaker drivers of performance over time. This question is also important to managers because its answer would inform whether in a given context, firms should invest in building technological capabilities or not. I predict and find that in low complementarity contexts, as technology advances, customer demand for greater product performance becomes satiated. As a result, customers neither pay for greater product performance nor buy higher performing products pre maturely. As firms lose these two levers by which technological capabilities drive performance, they find that technological capabilities become weaker drivers of performance. I also propose that when technological capabilities become weaker drivers of performance, firm performance becomes more persistent, in the sense that past performance drives future performance. Through a rigorous quantitative analysis, complemented by an in-depth qualitative analysis of the US CT scanner industry from its inception, I find support for the theory. Using robust regression and multinomial logistic regression models, I find that as technology in an industry advances, technological capabilities become weaker drivers of firm performance. I discuss the shortcomings of this research and potential for future research. I also discuss the implications of this research on capability theory, resource based view, and on existing explanations of industry shakeout. / Dissertation

The purpose of this study is to analyze the current situation and trend over Taiwan's Specialty Chemicals of Printed Circuit Board industry. In addition, this study explores the optimal management strategy through competitive strategy theory and case study, and proposes suggestions on management stratedy to Specialty Chemicals of Printed Circuit Board industry. The key success factors were summarized from literature review and analysis of current industry status. By using these factors as variables to design the questionnaire and conducting the survey with in-depth interview, following concousions were made from the study. 1.The business advangate of Taiwan Specialty Chemicals of Printed Circuit Board industry includes the well-developed finance and stable capital support, great R&D ability, stable quality sandard, outstanding customer and after-sale service, plenty talent person for management and technology, and excellent enterprise culture. 2.Key factors affecting the competiveness among the Taiwan Specialty Chemicals of Printed Circuit Board industry are as follows. (1)Suppliers: product quality and the ability of problems solving and readily answering form suppliers. (2)Customers: identification with the brand quality and the bargaining power and purchasing amount of customers. (3)New entrants: distinctive product and technology, product differentiation and cost advantage. (4)Substitute products: function, quality, price, switching cost and R&D ability of substitute products. (5)Competitive rivalry: switching cost of customers, the integral industry growth rate and the integral actual strength of competitors. 3.The study suggests the Taiwan Specialty Chemicals of Printed Circuit Board industry to adopt the following competitive strategy. (1)Cost leadership strategy: to seek for suppliers with lower supplying cost, stable suppling and lower manpower cost. (2)Differentiation strategy: product innovation and quality. (3)Growth strategy: vertical intergration of upstream to downstream manufacturering partners and discriminiate market development.

In order to stay sustainably competitive and provide low cost, high quality products safely and on schedule, China Steel Group must depend on a highly automated and sophisticated electric control system for dynamic and optimized control. Therefore, the promotion of group synergy as well as integration and management of the resources of China Steel Group¡¦s electric control system become the main purpose of this study. This study is based on resource-based theory, Collis & Montgomery's strategy and the literatures on Group Company¡¦s management. Management system of Formosa Plastics Group, three Japanese and one Korean Steel Groups were also investigated as benchmarking practices. Following issues have been analyzed via 4 experts¡¦ interviews and 135 questionnaires: 1).Core electric control resources with sustainable competitive advantage of China Steel Group, 2).The electric control resources¡¦ integration and management system of China Steel Group, 3).The necessity and direction to establish China Steel Group¡¦s general management office. Findings and conclusions of this study are shown as follows: 1) . Core electric control resources with sustainable competitive advantage of China Steel Group: a. Expertise is the most important core resources of electric control system; process and operation domain knowledge, process control maintenance knowledge and basic engineering of electric control project are the most sustainable competitive advantage in daily business operation. b. Process domain knowledge in rolling mill is the most valuable and difficult electric core resource and need to be enhanced first. c. The most important factors to evaluate the performance of electric control business are: quality, time schedule, safety and environmental protection, technical ability, communication and coordination services. 2) . The electric control resources¡¦ integration and management of China Steel Group: a. Through resources, business and organization as well as by the coordination and monitoring system, the integration and management of the electric control resources of China Steel Group will become more effectively. b. In addition to the original electric control maintenance and engineering business, China Steel Group should strengthen the function of electric control professional staff to integrate the group¡¦s resources. c. The way to integrate electric control resources are: technology and information integration, material and logistics integration, process/organization and human resources integration. d. Project detail design and software maintenance for DCS and PLC should be subcontracted to subsidiary company, InfoChamp System Corp., to enhance its capability in addition to keep core capability inside China Steel Group. e. Maintain the existing district-based electric maintenance system; Integrate group-wide resources to set up group¡¦s electric control engineering company responsible for all group's electric control projects; Functions of companies¡¦ electric control department shall be transformed into group¡¦s professional staff. 3) . The necessity and direction to establish China Steel Group¡¦s general management office: a. The performance of resource integration in China Steel Group is very important. b. More than 85.2% of respondents considered Group¡¦s general management office should be established or expand the parent company (China Steel Corp.) existing organizations to integrate the resources of China Steel Group. Finally, the result of this study is not only meaningful for China Steel Group but also can be applied in other industry group companies and engineering companies.

In respond to the trend of globalization and IT applications, the pressure by big international companies on cost reduction to OEM companies required a 3%-5% goal every year. What OEM companies need is to keep on with the goal fulfillment and to work on some innovation programs with their business model. They change business model from OEM to ODM to make them survive through challenges and gain profit margin. OEM companies in Taiwan are mostly smaller in many ways in contrast to foreign companies, although they are good at precision manufacturing as their core and manufacture high quality products. It is suitable for those companies to adopt a strategic alliance to integrate their competences to create synergies. This can build up a solid supply chain collaboration platform and new business model with a vantage position and competitive advantages. GMTC, the case company, applied for industrial technology development projects sponsored by the Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) as strategies to introduce their new collaborating-commerce business model around year 2002 to 2006. They invoked their strategies to integrate the supply chains for expansion through startup a new business model for partners to understand, communicate and improve the value chain to link to the global companies. The performances cause high impacts on collaborative effectiveness among value chain partners. This thesis, based on a case study of GMTC, is to analyze and find the key factors make strategies success and to demonstrate how. Organizational learning - learning history is used in this study to analyze and research the strategies in order to find out what GMTC have done in the past. Implications for planning and moving a new business model or strategy on supply chain are discussed and future research suggestions are provided.

In recent years, tourism has been recognized as the most potential industry. Kaohsiung is a city which has a very rich cultural and natural resources such as mountains, sea, river and sea port to develop the tourism industry. Due to the official opening of high speed railway and completion of Kaohsiung Mass Rapid Transit increased accessibility to attract many tourists. The most popular tourist accommodation is the new "daily rental suites" instead of the traditional hotels or motels. Through the competitive advantage matrix analysis model to find out the competitive advantage of daily rental suites, one dimension is from the outside analysis the key success factors of the industry, the other dimension is from the inside analysis the assets and capabilities of the daily rental suites which select three well-known ones in Kaohsiung as my study cases. The main contribution of this research is summarized six competitive advantages of daily rental suite through the matrix as (1) location, (2) the reputation and the brand, (3) service quality, (4) price, (5) atmosphere and (6) room equipment and decoration. The results show that daily rental suite¡¦s core resources how match with the key success factors. By examining their feature of the core resources to reinforce his internal assets as well as capabilities, so as to keep and create its competitive advantage.

This research analysis automobile industry of China and Germany, based on theory of the competitive advantage of nations. Currently China is the largest market of automobile production and sales of the world. The huge domestic market demand is sufficient to reflect the rapid growth of the automobile industry for the Chinese automotive industry, while Germany automobile industry has long been acknowledged by the average consumer due to its technology and quality assurance. Global warming and energy consumption has led to global environmental awareness, which influence the cooperation model of China and Germany on automobile industry. In this thesis the cooperation model will be analyzed, the conclusion of analyze could be as the positive advice for the development of Taiwan automobile industry in the future.

Engineering and Construction Services is a traditional manufacturing industry, provides factory or facility construction service for petrochemical, electrical power, steel manufacturer, storage and transfer system, environmental protection, technology, energy and public construction project. Most of domestic small and medium sized engineering and construction companies lack of resources for working capital, technical manpower, project management and design capability, such that they are not able to take part in the bidding for a large turnkey project. They can only contract for a smaller construction or be a subcontractor for a larger engineering and construction company, beside that, their profit will be very negligible due to lower entry barrier of this industry. In recent years, more and more companies of petrochemical industry move to foreign countries as well as global economic downturn, case number of domestic construction projects is trending down. Most of medium and small engineering and construction companies are in the face of business distress because of the tough competition, and that will limit the growth of business. In the mature and competitive industry, the most import strategy for medium and small companies is to build up core ability, build competitive advantage, and improve competitiveness. After that, the companies will have adequate resources and abilities to become a larger company which can enlarge the scale of operation, move to overseas market, and maximize the stockholders¡¦ value. To become a large company is very import for medium and small construction companies. All of these are the vision of small and medium sized engineering and construction companies and are the most important mission of the administrator of the companies. In this thesis, qualitative research method was used to study C Company by using PEST, Porter 5-force, value chain and SWOT analysis. The purpose of this work is to build up the strategy of competitive advantage for medium and small companies, and to find out proper business strategy for C Company. Some advices will be given to break through the business bottleneck, to enhance core competitiveness, and to enlarge the business scale and scope of C Company. We wish to share our experiences of competitive advantage building up and company renovation.

Over the last few decades, the rising concern of environmental protection and consumers¡¦ increasing environmental consciousness have brought fundamental impacts to enterprises in the world. Environmental protection has become one of corporate social responsibilities, and in the meantime, one of the opportunities for profitability. Among all resources in organizations, human resource plays the most important role in keeping corporate competitive advantage. In order to create and maintain corporate competitive advantage, traditional human capital also has to be transformed into green human capital that possesses the ability to develop green innovation. The purpose of this research is to investigate how green human capital will be influential on the level green innovation, and how it actually leads to corporate competitive advantage. The study uses in-depth interviews and questionnaires to collect data for the analysis. The results reveal that green human capital strategic value has a positive impact on green product innovation and green product innovation has a mediating effect in the relationship between green human capital strategic value and responsiveness. On the other hands, green human capital uniqueness has a positive impact on green process innovation and green process innovation plays a mediating effect in the relationship between green human capital uniqueness and cost advantage.

The Law for the Development of the Cultural and Creative Industries is passed by the Legislative Yuan on Feb 3, 2010 and implementated on August 30, 2010. It shows that the Taiwanese government is devoted into cultural and creative industries, and also to position cultural and creative industries in a significant place of culture policy. In the Law, there are 16 categories. Among them, the researcher thinks that the handicrafts industry, the digital content industry and the visual communication design industries are full of developmental potential. Therefore, this study will draw three cultural and creative industry projects form these industries as the focus of the analysis. This research applies the resource-based theory on three Taiwan's cultural and creative industry companies. The research interviews one case of each industry listed above. Through interviews and documents, the research attempts to understand those companies¡¦ internal resources, explore their core competencies, and further analyze of the competitive advantages and strategies. Several research questions are listed: what are the successful factors of three cases? What resources are available in their companies? What are their competitive strategies? The analysis will help to understand the development of Taiwan's cultural and creative enterprise and business. In addition, interviewees also provided suggestions for the current policy of Taiwan's cultural and creative industries. Finally, the researcher provides suggestions to the three cases, Taiwanese government on policy of Cultural and Creative Industries in Taiwan, also made efforts for the further studies.

The study is based on the views of medical equipment agent industry, to discuss the transition and development of government procurement system and the effect on industry benefits, disadvantages by public policy. Both "political" and "economy" are the purposes of Government Procurement Law (GPL). Government procurement operations have to be political fairness and the economic benefit at the same time. The dilemma for GPL design is to prevent abuse, which is far away from the public policy object, and to avoid interfering with the operation of free market. In this thesis, open information of Ministry of Economic Affairs and Public Construction Commission, data from newspaper, papers, government laws, and the experiments of medical instrument agents were involved to study the relationships and interactions between themselves. This research studies on the operation of GPL through literature review to confirm the questions and framework for the qualification, specification, prices. We interviewed four senior medical equipment suppliers (OEM, agent) for data analysis and collection. Between the competitive structure of market and non-market environment, enterprises are focus to achieve the best business interest and the highest efficiency, however, they are at a loss in the conflict of public policy spirit and the operation of the law. On the limitation of bureaucratic culture and regulatory constraints, how to strengthen government ¡§procurement management", to formulate a integrity, flexible, and authorized procurement system is very important. We think there is very large space to improve whole medical industry, and some advices was brought out in government procurement enhancement, medical instrument industry development, and the benefit of people health. All public policies and rules need to combine with reality and current status. If we only consider theoretical reduction, but ignore the influence of reality, all laws will be a mere formality and useless. GPL is a ¡§law of large numbers¡¨ which has large difference in variety of industries and may need to modify in the change of environment. If GPL was modified roughly, even a good law would be canceled out. Business managers need have ability to manage political environment, to dealing with emergency, and to maintain and create competitive advantages by adapting political environment and laws. The development of medical equipments is a business that is combined with technical innovation, high R&D risk, public interests, and economical interests. Governments need assist and guide the direction of GPL correctly, and only for that, the dreams for building the Taiwan Biological Technology Island can come true.