Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3 Methodology
3.1 Questionnaire Design
In our research, the content of the questionnaire is divided into four major parts. In
the first part we measure the degree of firm's absorptive capacity, including three
sub-constructs: knowledge acquisition, knowledge diffusion, and knowledge
utilization. Part two captures the communication network between firms in STSP.
On a list showed all organizations of the optoelectronics industry in STSP, the
respondents were asked to indicate what kind of relationship with other firms and
institutions they have. There are three types of relationship proposed in the
questionnaire: buyer/supplier, competitor, and other. In other words, the analytic
network in this research consists of three kinds of communication relationships, and
three groups of actors. In the third part the respondents were asked to evaluate their
firm's level of network competence. We use three items based on the work of
Abernathy & Utterback (1988) - efficiency of R&D process, number of successful
new product developments, and time-to-market for newly developed products, to
measure a firm's innovation performance. We finally aggregate these three items
into an index of innovation performance. The final part includes basic company
information.
3.2 Data Collection and Analysis Structure
The STSP gathers optoelectronics manufactures and constructs a complete social
network. It can be seen that a complete supply chain, especially for LCD firms, was
formed in STSP and became more worthy as an observation target for our research.
Three copies of Questionnaire were sent to each firms of the optoelectronics cluster
in STSP, the respondents include senior managers, R&D staffs, and
purchasing/sales agents at different levels/department. By the limited sample size,
sampling methods have not been taken into account. Data collection was conducted
from January till May 2007. Altogether, 43 firms and institutions were contacted.
27 questionnaires were retrieved, which is a return rate of 62.7%. If we only
consider LCD firms, which is the core of our first stage research, the return rate
increases up to 85.7% (refer to Table 1).
Table 1
The statistics of Questionnaire copies
Types of Actors in STSP
LCD firms
Institutions
Other Firms
Total
Copies distributed
21
10
12
43
Missing/invalid copies
3
6
7
16
Copies returned
18
4
5
27
Response ra
te
85.7%
40%
41.6%
62.7%
Manager numbers
16
4
3
23
Position
Staff numbers
2
0
2
4
