International Journal of Technology Management

Special Issue on: "Competitiveness Assessment and Enhancement for Virtual Organisations"

Guest Editors:
Toly Chen and Yi-Chi Wang, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Zdeněk Mikoláš, Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Competitiveness is the ability and performance of a firm, sub-sector or country to sell or supply goods or services in a given market. Competitiveness engineering is a systematic procedure, including a series of activities that assess and enhance competitiveness. Michael Porter wrote of five forces that influence the competitiveness of an enterprise: the threat of substitute products, the threat of established rivals, the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of suppliers, and the bargaining power of customers. However, these invisible forces mostly come from outside the company, and it is difficult to assess their impact. Nevertheless, non-imitable and non-substitutable organisational capabilities (and resources) have been noted to be a key source of inter-firm performance differences.

There have been some relevant references in this field, but most of them have focused on exploring the factors affecting competitiveness (such as cost, quality, customer satisfaction, technical competence, etc.) and ways to improve competitiveness (such as balanced scorecards, blue ocean strategies, lean production, green supply chains, learning organisations, etc.). Although competitiveness is represented as a critical issue, nothing is said about what quantitatively constitutes a high or low level of competitiveness.

In today’s era of global markets, virtual organisations, including e-businesses, virtual enterprises and supply/demand chains, are forms of alliance that have been proven to be more efficient. In addition, the following topics have also appeared in this field:

1.Green competitiveness: applying strategy to achieve productivity and overall socioeconomic development while reaching the goal of sustainable development.
2.Sustainable competitiveness: Foxconn’s pay increase in 2010 led to continued improvements to the Chinese wage level; this made it more difficult to obtain low-cost human resources. Many companies began to migrate to regions with lower wage levels to maintain their competitive edge.
3.Competitiveness versus productivity: thinking in terms of competitiveness could lead to wasteful spending, while in the context of factories, productivity is what matters.

This special issue is intended to provide details of developing advanced methodologies and their applications to the assessment and enhancement of competitiveness for virtual organisations. It will feature a balance between state-of-the-art research and usually reported applications. The issue will also provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to review and disseminate quality research work on advanced methodologies and their applications in the context of competitiveness assessment and enhancement for virtual organisations, and to identify critical issues for further developments.


Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
•Competitiveness assessment
•Competitiveness assessment and enhancement for a virtual enterprise
•Competitiveness assessment and enhancement for an e-business
•Competitiveness assessment and enhancement for a supply chain
•Competitiveness assessment and enhancement for a demand chain
•Maintaining competitiveness through strategic alliances
•Meta-performances of competitiveness
•Competitiveness planning, e.g. the balanced scoreboard
•Competitiveness enhancement strategy
◦Blue ocean strategy
◦Lean production
◦Green supply chains
◦Value chain
◦Learning organisations
◦Innovation sourcing
•Green competitiveness
•Sustainable competitiveness
•Competitiveness impacts of changes and policies