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Notes: 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 in technological change’ existing, discusses the major findings, and suggests directions for future research.

Notes: 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 R&D issues in the early 1980s and the most significant results of 20 years of rapid industrialization. Based on this historic review and a wide literature analysis, some observations are made about China's R&D capabilities in the first years of the new millennium as well as what challenges may still lie ahead for China before becoming a leading source of scientific and technological innovation.

Notes: 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 through the state and industry. The second looks at the manpower and organisational problems resulting from the economic backwardness of the country and past mistakes in trying to overcome it.

Notes: 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 to finding the supplier, possibly with the help of a specialized intermediary. Several large firms have indeed developed ambitious mechanisms for acquiring the needed technological know-how as they proceed to make and market a new product.We contend that this concept of the technology transfer process is erroneous, as it conflicts with actual practice. The very high transaction costs entailed leave considerable room for opportunistic behavior and are more likely to occur when the parties do not know each other. An effective way to reduce transaction costs, therefore, is to limit technology transfers to the firm's partners, i.e. organizations with which the firm has already interacted in the past. Our research provides evidence that successful technology transfers typically take place between suppliers and buyers who had business relationships before considering a technology agreement. In addition, we report findings that companies using intermediaries (technological opportunities catalogues, databases, fairs, etc.) have been disappointed in their attempts to find new technologies from unknown sources.Because of the high risk of opportunistic behavior, it is practically impossible to assess the value of a technology without knowing who sells it. Similarly, the technology transfer capabilities of a company are difficult to appraise without prior knowledge through business interaction. To a certain extent, it may be better to buy any technology from a partner that one knows well than to buy a supposedly good technology from a firm with which one has had no experience. To put it bluntly: the identity of the partner may actually matter more than the technology being traded!Consequently, the relevant framework for technology transfer is built on a ‘network concept’ rather than the ‘market concept’. Firms wishing to acquire new technology should turn first to their network of trusted business partners, looking for available technological opportunities instead of trying to buy technology from unrelated organizations.

Notes: AbstractThe 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 projects, resulting in the co-development of new weapon systems. This paper examines fourteen such case studies (six that were relatively successful and eight that were less successful) and attempts to draw lessons from the experiences of these projects.Among the lessons which are strongly represented in this set of projects are: the importance of insulating the projects from the vagaries of international politics, the need to provide strong project leadership and a forum for partners to work out their differences, and the bestowal of significant authority in the hands of the project manager.

Notes: 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 original instrument to a more convenient size; 2) to compare the concept of innovative climate between R&D performing units in a developing country, and an economy characterized by relatively strong central control, with the original British data; and 3) to utilize the dimensions of innovative climate to consider some hypotheses concerning the performance of R&D in developing countries and in China in particular.

Notes: 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 modeling realistic aspects of the portfolio selection problem. Further, integer goal programming combined with simulation is suggested as an alternate approach for solving the dynamic multiple-objective problem.

Notes: 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 documents these changes through the findings of a study in the US power tool industry of the effectiveness of the product-process matrix in explaining the operations strategies of firms over the period 1970-1990. Utilizes data from a detailed literature-based survey, from on-site interviews with executives and tours of manufacturing plants in the industry to explore the strategies followed over time by main and niche power tool firms competing in the US market. Shows that, while the Hayes and Wheelwright product-process model captures many aspects of strategic operations decisions through 1980, changes have dramatically altered the competitive landscape and that many of the trade-offs central to the model are no longer central to the articulation and formulation of operations strategy.