Innovation and competitiveness in manufacturing: Two essays.

摘要

Managing technological and organizational changes is becoming fundamental to managing the operations of a modern manufacturing plant. The technological and organizational changes are aimed at improving competitiveness of plants. Our literature review suggests that neither the dynamics of the changes occurring in plants nor its impact on plant competitiveness is well understood. My dissertation, which comprises two studies, is an attempt to address both these problems.; (1) In the first essay on Innovation in Manufacturing we present a conceptualization of the innovation implementation process, in the context of operations of a high technology manufacturing. Building on developments in organizational learning theory, we frame the problem of innovation implementation in high technology manufacturing as a problem of balancing between exploitation and exploration. Through the application of a logistic difference equation, we show that the innovation implementation in high technology manufacturing can be conceptualized as a chaotic process, in a scientific sense. We empirically test this conceptualization using longitudinal production data from a wafer fabrication plant of a U.S semiconductor manufacturing company. Our results provide empirical support for the two properties of chaotic behavior--presence of an attractor and sensitive dependence to initial conditions.; (2) In the second essay Competitiveness in Manufacturing we present a model-based approach to conduct competitive analysis of plants. As part of this approach, we propose a measure of plant competitiveness and present a conceptual framework to identify and classify drivers of plant competitiveness in terms of operational policies. We demonstrate the application of the model-based approach using cross-sectional data from 20 plants from the U.S. food processing industry.; The two studies were conducted in different industrial settings--semiconductor industry and food processing industry. The two studies also employed different research designs. Because of these differences, the empirical results from the two studies cannot be synthesized directly. We, however, provide a conceptual synthesis of the findings of the two essays, and explore directions for future research.