While previous research describes a broad set of factors that discriminate between new product success and failure, both the study findings and the models developed have tended to be very general. This has made it difficult for those involved in NPD to apply the lessons presented - "they are unable to relate them directly to their own situation" (Craig & Hart, 1992: 38). However, the way companies undertake the process activities during the development and launch of a new product has regularly been identified as being critical to the outcome of the NPD project (Booz et al, 1982; Cooper, 1979,1980,1990; Crawford, 1984; Maidique & Zirger, 1984). This research fills a gap in the literature by explicitly focusing on the internal NPD process activities and project organisation within one industry, the Automotive Components Industry. The contribution of the research is to identify the critical success factors for the NPD process within Automotive Component firms, confirm whether different dimensions of success exist for this industry and identify whether the antecedents of successful NPD differ depending on the dimensions of success. A model was developed, which was then tested using a six page postal questionnaire sent out to UK automotive component suppliers. 76 completed questionnaires were collected from 66 firms. After a careful reliability and validity analysis of the measures used in the survey, a multiple regression analysis was undertaken to identify the critical success factors for each of the dimensions of success. The findings from this research validate many ideas presented in the NPD literature. However, what is evident from this research is that new product success dimensions can not be treated together, and that average models can be misleading. This may well have made it difficult for practitioners to relate the findings of previous studies to their specific development situations and could begin to explain why, despite all the research that has been undertaken in this area, failure rates are still so high.

Introduction –ISO 14001 is one of the environmental management systems (EMS) that are used in industries in order to deal with environmental issues. Many researchers point out that the adoption of ISO 14001 could help firms improve operational procedures and gain competitive advantages, increase their environmental performance, adopt management strategies in terms of energy consumption, materials and waste, cost efficiency and company reputation. Previous studies have focused on the connection between ISO 14001 and technology innovation. However, there are still some gaps in the literature between the effect of ISO 14001 and other types of innovation (product, production, position), especially in small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Purpose – This paper studied the implementation of ISO 14001 in SMEs associated with the improvement and performance of different dimensions of innovation (product/process/position). Design/Methodology – This study had a phenomenological approach. A case study was used for examining the innovation actions and activities that were developed by the help of ISO 14001. Documents were used to collect secondary data, especially in firm performance in order to show the innovation performance before and after implementation of ISO 14001. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data from four employees among top management as well as staff who are related to ISO 14001 and each type of innovation in aluminium industry – FEAL AB in this case –  in Horndal, Sweden. Each interview session took around 20 minutes. Findings – The finding shows that the adoption of ISO 14001 led to incremental changes in product and process innovation. ISO 14001 led the company to innovate their products by using new chemical materials that are environmentally friendly, and ISO 14001 requirements were used when specifying requirements for new products. It also led the firm to develop a procurement process, waste management, and organization strategies. Yet, there was no positive impact of the implementation of ISO 14001 on position innovation. In terms of performance, ISO 14001 led to improved performance in product and process innovation. It led the firm to have better methodology, cost efficiency and waste reduction. It also changed behaviour and mind-set of employees and the process for developing new products. Research limitations and further study – Only one case – a 25-year-old SME in the aluminium industry in Sweden - was used in this research. It can be broadened to either comparative case studies or quantitative studies in order to compare the influences of ISO 14001 on innovation and performance among them. Practical implication –This study could provide a guideline for building innovation in SME firms with the help of ISO 14001 in order to create competitive advantages in highly competitive markets. It could improve innovation activities in order to have positive effect on a firm’s products and performance in a sustainable way. Moreover, firms could use innovation improvements and performance that are developed with the help of ISO 14001 as a manner for promoting company reputation. Theoretical contribution – This paper shows that SMEs which certified according to ISO 14001 tend to rapidly improve their innovations particularly in process and organization innovation. All in all, the perception of ISO 14001 is opposed by this study. The ISO 14001 is about not only environment but innovation as well.

The most important thing for company to stay competitive is keeping innovative. When a new product launches to the market, you must keep developing another new product to move faster than the competitors. Besides, the human resource and equipment to develop new products must be a huge investment. The returns are not always guaranteed. Without R&D investment, the company will be out of competition in a short time.The employees always be encouraged to have innovative thinking with incentives. Sometimes, their creative ideas would bring unexpected effect and benefit the company. How does R&D personnel to have innovation? The purpose of the research is to understand the elements of innovation on R&D personnel. From the case company, Taiflex Scientific Co., Ltd, to have creative employees would bring tremendous benefits to the company. Every company would ask the R&D team to keep innovative and to develop new products continuously in order to be the leader in the market. If we can understand what the elements of the innovation, we can recruit creative personnel and speed up the development. While the company can launch new products quicker and raise up the company competitiveness, R&D team is the main weapon to fight the competitors. This is a case study of Taiflex Scientific Co., Ltd. There are 5 teams in the case company and all members are treated equally under same working environment and incentive policy. This study focus on the relationship between the innovative behavior of R&D personnel, also the team innovation performance and the influencing factors. The Purpose of the study is to understand the factors of the innovative behaviors on R&D persons and the relation between innovative team and performance. The factors are personality traits and KEYS. This study adopts Five Factor Model (Big Five) that includes Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness , Conscientiousness, on the personality traits. The study of organization factors adopts KEY structure. The result is concluded from questionnaire survey and interviews. The main factors on R&D innovation are personality traits, but team atmosphere would have only certain influence. From the case study, Openness to Experience and Extraversion have higher contribution to innovative behavior than Neuroticism, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The freedom from the team atmosphere is the main factor for R&D personnel innovation. The challenging job is the second important factor. The case company shows that innovative team behavior has positive connection on R&D performance. The more creative team has better performance. Besides, personnel working experience and education would have certain effect. The purpose of the study is to know the requirements such as personality traits, working experience and education while recruiting R&D personnel. Then we can find the suitable person, have better performance and keep the company competitive.

Background: Innovation’s role in economic growth is crucial. Countries have acknowledged that and introduced innovation policies to promote economic growth since the ‘80s. But governments must have the capacity and effectiveness to support organizations and institutions for innovation, so the uneven development among countries raises the question of whether it is affected by government effectiveness. Objectives: This work investigates the interlink between government effectiveness as measured by the World Bank, and innovation performance, as measured by the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). Its objective is to identify how government effectiveness affects innovation performance. Methodology: This work follows a quantitative research strategy since the study is based on a large dataset and uses statistics to analyze data. To explore the impact of the variables, this work follows a panel regression approach. The data are publicly available by EU and World Bank. The data set consists of the Summary Innovation Index (SII) -an overall score in the EIS-, and the Government Effectiveness(GE) index from the World Bank during 2014-2020. Results: According to the analysis, the Fixed Effects Least Square Dummy Variables (FE-LSDV)regression model is superior to the other models (pooled OLS and Random Effects). The FE-LSDVmodel can explain 68.88% of the data. The analysis also shows that GE negatively impacts SII by a factor of -0,3228078. However, the P value and t-tests reveal that the correlation is not statistically significant. Conclusions: Our results contradict the previous studies. This may be due to the weaknesses identified in the previous studies, the time lag effect between the change in the government effectiveness index when the change in the innovation performance is noticeable, and the inverted U-shape relationship between innovation performance and government quality. Recommendations for future research: As future work can be suggested, an analysis including data from the previous funding periods. Also, the elasticity of innovation performance regarding government effectiveness within a larger time period can be studied. Furthermore, researchers can broaden the time period to include data over a minimum of 14 years period to investigate the time-lag effect and the inverted U-shape relationship.

Customer involvement in innovation activities is a common practice among companies in most industries. It has been widely researched by scholars to demonstrate its risks and advantages. Yet, the growing importance and recognition of the Internet are transforming the scope, boundaries, and dynamics of interactions among firms and customers. Progressing information and communication technologies (ICTs) (including the Internet) enable faster, cheaper, and more efficient collaboration. The demonstrated benefits of using various web-based methods for customer involvement in innovation activities have encouraged companies to adopt a new approach. Despite this, there is a lack of knowledge about associated challenges. In addition, prior research was unable to provide empirical evidence of the claimed benefits ensuing from web-enabled customer involvement. As a result, companies may experience unforeseen difficulties and may not be able to achieve what they expect from their implementation of web-based methods. This thesis aims to address this research gap by exploring web-enabled customer involvement from a firm’s perspective. The overall purpose of this dissertation is to increase the understanding of web-enabled customer involvement in innovation activities by exploring its use and its impact on firms’ innovation, as well as management competences needed for its efficient realization. The thesis draws on the concept of absorptive capacity and includes four empirical studies from various industries. The adoption levels of a wide range of web-based methods were identified and compared with the findings of the previous study, thereby uncovering interesting changes in their popularity, as well as differences in adoption among companies in various industries. The empirical findings of this thesis show that web-based methods increase a company’s probability to introduce service innovations. Three types of challenges related to different types of web-based methods were identified and verified. It was also possible to identify corresponding management practices to handle these challenges. The management practices form three firm competences, constituting a specific absorptive capacity. It was proved that all dimensions of this specific absorptive capacity are needed for successful and effective customer involvement. Insights of this thesis contribute to increasing the understanding of web-enabled customer involvement. Therefore, the thesis provides companies with empirically verified knowledge that is necessary to make decisions about the implementation and management of web-enabled customer involvement.

In the era of knowledge economy, human capital is the important capital which enterprise can rely on and maintain the competitiveness, and also the source of power for continuous innovation. To stimulate the working intention of knowledge worker is one of the important tasks for an enterprise to elaborate their human capital. This paper investigates the Biotechnology industry in order to understand that how the presentation of human capital in this knowledge intensive industry affects the innovation performance through the knowledge worker management. By the empirical data and statistic analysis in this paper, the findings are as below: I.The aspects of human capital are: the executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors, the entrepreneurship of employees, the investment and exploitation in human capital, and excellent hire. II.The aspects of knowledge worker management are: the leadership of knowledge, the working styles with challenge, the plan of employees¡¦ development, organic designs of work, reasonable evaluation of performance, and the promotion of knowledge exchange. III.The aspects of innovation performance are: innovation of product and innovation of manufacture. IV.The influences of human capital on innovation performance. 1.The executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors and the investment and exploitation of human capital both have significant positive effects on the innovation of products. Among which the investment and exploitation of human capital effects more than the executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors does. 2.The entrepreneurship of employees has a significant negative effect on the innovation of products; the excellent hire has no significant effect. 3.The executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors and the investment and exploitation of human capital both have significant positive effects on the innovation of manufacture. Among which the investment and exploitation of human capital effects more than the executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors does. 4.The entrepreneurship of employees and excellent hire has no significant effect on the innovation of manufacture. V.The moderating effects on innovation performance from the interaction of human capital and knowledge worker management. 1.The interactions of excellent hire and leadership of knowledge, the working styles with challenge, and reasonable evaluation of performance have significant positive effect on innovation of products. 2.The interaction of the executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors and organic designs of work has significant negative effect on innovation of products. 3.The interaction of the investment and exploitation of human capital and organic designs of work has significant positive effect on innovation of products. 4.The interaction of excellent hire and the plane of employees¡¦ development has significant positive effect on innovation of manufacture. 5.The interaction of the investment and exploitation of human capital and reasonable evaluation of performance has significant negative effect on innovation of manufacture. 6.The interaction of the executives¡¦ direction ability of vision supervisors and the promotion of knowledge exchange has significant positive effect on innovation of manufacture. 7.The interaction of the entrepreneurship of employees and the promotion of knowledge exchange has significant negative effect on innovation of manufacture.

It is known that imagination causes creation. However, in an enterprise, creation may be achieved by the communication and sharing opinions among the members of the team. Working in the complicated working environment, it is the team rather than the individual that plays a vital role in the generation of the innovation. There is a lack in the academic area of the investigation the team work containing the process of the interaction within the group. Until 2001, Hoegl and Gemuenden brought a new concept called TeamWork Qauility (TWQ), which emphasizes that the quality of the interaction in the group determines whether the creation will succeed or not. Moreover, since the organizational innovative climate largely affects the team¡¦s innovation performance, playfulness in the working place is gradually being noticed. The research applied from Yu , Ping and Wu, Ji-Jing (2003) defines team playfulness climate as a kind of internal working environment which is formed by personal interaction and relation. With this open and joyful atmosphere, people can feel safe and joyful to explore anything related to their work. With this playful climate, people can be inspired and satisfied and bring more contribution to innovation performance. The subjects were consisted of groups of students from 19 colleges who took the course ¡§The Discovery and Application of Creativity¡¨ and joined the Creative Program Competition which was held by the Consulting Division in Ministry of Education. The evidence of this research is based on the questionnaires given out to these students. In this research, we have 688 valid questionnaires from 99 teams. The rate of the effective achievement is 69.30%. The reliability of TWQ and organizational playfulness climate are respectively 0.95 and 0.92. The data was analyzed by statistical methods of descriptive statistics, factor analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis and structural equation model. The major results of this study are as following: 1. Team playfulness climate partly influences team innovation performance. 2. TWQ has significant positive influence on team playfulness climate. 3. Team playfulness climate mediates the relationship between TQW and team innovation performance.

This research purpose is a theoretical foundation shared with social capital and knowledge share. How to utilize the social capital and knowledge share to leverage inside knowledge with the relation between the project teams to research IC design industry in Taiwan, apply it to new product development and technological uniqueness. This case will xplore how the social capitial, knowledge share and innovation performance of three research parameters interact among themselves. This research shows that three dimensions of social capital are in the different results of knowledge share, social capitial can produce the result of promoting with the innovation performance and knowledge share, also the social capital of the metaphor is that one kind regards other resources as long-term investment that invest the key element and can expect to produce the flow of benefit in the future just like other capital, is worth to pay attenation and reappraises the research in IC design industry. Based on the IC design industry and the project team as the research object, it is the parent to grind the 300 companies of ITIS institute on the Taiwan IC design industry, this research, in accordance with the classification of the products (logic design and memory design), in accordance with dividing one floor of random samplings, 18 logic design companies and 12 memory design companies, each one company grants 10 questionnaires, 30 companies grant 300 questionnaires altogether. The research examines for the executive of project team of IC design, adopt the network questionnaire to construct examining, 103 effective questionnaires are collected altogether, effective questionnaire is 34.3% of rate of recovery. The result of study of this research is as follows: 1. There are significantly positive correlations among social capital, knowledge share, and innovation performance. 2. Different control variables has partially significant positive effect on social capital, knowledge share, and innovation performance. 3. There are significantly positive effects among the structural dimension and cognitive dimension. 4. Each structural and congnitive dimensions has a significantly positive effect on relational dimension. 5. Each structural,relation, and congnitive dimensions has a significantly positive effect on knowledge share. 6. Knowledge share has a significantly positive effect on innovation performance. Key Words: project teams, social capital, knowledge share, innovation performance

With rapid development of technology in industries and aggressive globalization competitiveness, business operation success from the past does not guarantee present and future success, and the competitive advantages of enterprises may vanish after time or environment differences. Promoting new products and process innovation have becoming the main strategies for enterprises, and they also become the key points of the existence of enterprises. Therefore, enterprises should intake technological innovation when formulating strategies, and concentrate on their core resources and capabilities. Through the integrations, the enterprises will be able to react and get the sustainable competitive advantages when changes from outside and inside the organizations occurred. This research is using the Resource-Based View as foundation, and the high technology manufacturers and enterprises in Taiwan as our research objects. Exploring the characteristics of enterprise inner resources, capabilities and the impacts on creating sustainable competitive advantages through the interactions and effects when enterprises engage planning their technological innovation strategies. The obtained data is adapted by Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis. The research result is hopefully to be able to provide with the high technology manufacturers and enterprises in promoting the competitive advantages in business operation and decision application. The result of this research is that, the technological innovation strategy is indeed affected by core resources and capabilities. The different core resource contents and characteristics have remarkable effects on enterprises technological innovation strategies. This research result is corresponding with resource-strategy paradigm by the Resource-Based School. Technological innovation strategy has outstanding impact on the sustainable competitive advantages. Different types of technological innovation strategies have effects on innovation performances, which shows the importance of applying technological innovation strategy to enhance the competitive advantages. However, the core resource contents and characteristics do not show the direct impact on the sustainable competitive advantages. The core resources and capabilities of enterprises will have contribution to the sustainable competitive advantages by strategy formulation and implementation.

While facing a dynamic environment, a company needs innovation to enhance their competitiveness and to continue to grow in terms of profits. For the company, the question becomes not ¡§whether¡¨ but ¡§how¡¨ to innovate. This thesis, with a perspective of human resources, explores how organizational innovation capabilities, innovative culture, and human resource practices directly affect the effectiveness of innovation. In addition, the indirect impact of human resource practices intertwined with innovation capabilities and innovative culture as a mediator is also under scrutiny. This thesis is conducted through opinion survey, with 201 samples out of 250 manufacturers introduced by Tianxia Magazine. With the valid 111 questionnaires replied by the chairs or directors of human resources department in each company, the findings of this thesis can be summarized as follows: 1. Innovation capability impacts the innovation performance positively. 2. Innovative culture impacts the innovation performance positively. 3. Human resource practices impacts the innovation performance positively. 4. Human resource practices impacts the innovation capability positively. 5. Innovation capability has mediating effect between human resource practices and innovation performance. 6. Human resource practices impacts the innovative culture positively. 7. Innovative culture has mediating effect between human resource practices and innovation performance.