While withstanding a highly competitive environment, an increasing number of firms have recognized that intangible assets rather than tangible ones are vital to achieving competitive advantages. Intellectual capital has replaced physical capital as the primary basis of value creation. Although the importance of intellectual capital in ensuring superior competitive advantages is well accepted, exactly how these two constructs are related has seldom been investigated, particularly for the high‐technology industry. Taking a sample of 39 Taiwanese IC design companies, this study adopted data envelopment analysis and the Malmquist productivity index to evaluate the impact of intellectual capital on competitive advantage. The analytical results revealed that approximately one third of the companies sampled had excellent efficiency in intellectual capital management, while the others still had considerable room to improve their intellectual capital management. The results of this study provide a valuable reference for future studies in alternative contexts.

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Chief executives have recently identified knowledge management (KM) as a 'must do' item for their firms. These executives have also contended that social capital is a catalyst in effectively implementing knowledge management. However, the mechanism through which social capital influences knowledge management requires further study. This study examines the influence of social capital and business operation mode on knowledge creating activities, intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management effectiveness.After a series of interviews with experts and a questionnaire survey, this study reached the following findings:• firms implementing higher levels of authority delegation and social capital tend to engage in more knowledge-creating activities and have more intellectual capital• levels of intellectual capital tend to significantly influence KM effectiveness • social capital and delegation of authority are significant moderators of the relationships between knowledge-creating activities and intellectual capital.

0Developing an analytical framework to help examine the impact of hQs direct involvement in lateral innovation transfers on efficiency and effectiveness of 0 Develop hypotheses which are tested by multiple regression analyses on data relating to 129 lateral innovation transfers in multinational corporations 0 Three key findings: dyadic willingness positively affects transfer efficiency and effectiveness willingness HQ involvement negatively effects transfer efficiency; HQ involvement negatively moderates the effect of willingness on transfer effectiveness 0 HQ face a dilemma in managing lateral transfers: on the one hand, the network structure that typifies many MNCs has beneficial impacts on the performance of the transfer process; on the other hand the hQ need to ensure that lateral transfers initiated by subsidiaries ('organic' transfers) are in line with MNC strategy. However the findings from our study strongly suggest that hQ direct involvement in the transfer process is at best a very blunt instrument for achieving a resolution of this dilemma.

The recognition of nanoparticles by imprinted materials via entropic depletion attraction is investigated by dissipative particle dynamics simulations. It is found that the depletion attraction exits between nanoparticles and imprinted materials with complementary shapes based on the interaction energy U(H) and association energy E a . The strength of the attractive depletion grows with increasing size of a perfectly matched target/cavity (TC) pair owing to the increment in their overlapping excluded volumes. The uptake of targets can be significantly enhanced by increasing the concentration of depletant ϕ D . The selective recognition between perfectly matched and mismatched TC pairs is also studied, and a very high selectivity can be achieved at an optimal ϕ D . The kinetics of the recognition process reveals that small nanoparticles migrate fast and access the cavity easily but move out of the cavities eventually due to their weak association energy. Finally, the synergetic effect of entropic depletion and enthalpic affinity is proved to enhance the association fraction substantially for small perfectly matched TC pairs with weak affinity. Our simulation results demonstrate the importance of the depletion effect on the nanoparticle-imprinting technology.