Article Abstract:
The rate of market and technological changes has accelerated dramatically. Central to a firm's competitive success in these conditions is its ability to evaluate, develop, and commercialize new technologies. This turbulent environment requires new, innovative methods. To succeed in these conditions, improved cooperation is recommended among functions within the company and between companies. In this exploratory study of two middle European Union countries, the extent that industrial companies in highly turbulent environments develop their internal and external interfaces is measured. The study also measures if those firms with well developed interfaces exhibit better new product performance than firms with less well developed interfaces. The results indicate that an effective design of the new product development process depends upon the characteristics of the competitive environment in which the firm operates. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
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Article Abstract:
Some 665 advertisements were sampled from American, British, and German trade magazines and assessed by three bilingual judges to determine incidence of humor. Although there was some evidence that humorous messages may be less appropriate in business-to-business advertising, 23% of the ads contained humor. There were no differences in humor frequency among the three nationalities. Humor use varied by industry, and there was significant interaction between nationality and industry in humor ratings. Five types of humor were investigated; aggressive, sexual, nonsense, warm, and pun. Puns, nonsense humor, and warm humor were employed most often, with no national differences. Aggressive humor was used in some industries mor than others. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
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Article Abstract:
Information about competitors can hold great promise for improving innovation management. In this paper technological information about competitors is set into a framework of information systems on external data. It is then argued that while information collection and information use are decentralized the analysis of the information collected should be centralized. If intelligence on competitors is institutionalized, it serves to increase warning times before the introduction of innovations by competitors. This article studies the practice of analyzing competitors' technology by German companies. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
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