Yoko Takeda

Mobile commerce at crossroads

Lessons learned from an international study of users of mobile handheld devices and services.

The importance of technology integration capabilities: evaluating the impact of 3D technologies on product development performance in Japan and China

New multi-functional technologies often require technology integration capabilities that integrate new technologies into their organizational processes and introduce internal changes to ensure an effective fit with the new technology. This paper endeavours to examine the impact of 3D technologies such as 3D CAD on product development performance by means of a questionnaire survey. The results indicate that Japanese companies improved the performance as a result of the process reformations leveraged by the utilization of 3D technologies; however, no significant relationships were observed among the utilization of 3D technologies, process reformations, and total performance improvements for the Chinese companies surveyed.

How Technology is Made Visible When Exploring Its Application Fields

Industrial maturation and technological accumulation have fostered the need for the exploration of new applications of existing technology. This paper identifies how R&D workers from companies or research institutions visualize and describe their technology to other entities inside and outside the organization when they are exploring a technologys potential applications. This research uses a web-based questionnaire survey of R&D personnel working in Japan. The first finding of the survey shows that when the presentation team includes non-technical people (e.g. product development, marketing, or sales) in addition to the technical staff in-charge, technology visualization tends to be more effective. At the same time, the audience of such technology visualization should also be cross-functional. The second finding illustrates that, even though the audience is most often made up of acquaintances working within the same organization, technology visualization is also effective with non-acquaintances working in different organizations in order to lead to the successful exploration of such technologys potential applications.

Value Creation on Networks and in Corporate Activities

Information technologies enable the creation of new value in terms of changes in communication and cost structures. This chapter illustrates two cases in which a variety of knowledge of consumers or companies is pooled to produce new value: (1) a community site that has an enormous influence on product marketing, and (2) open-source software developed as a custom-made application system for a specific company.