Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a concept of an alignment between market and technology orientations (MTs) and investigates the difference in new product innovation activities and performance among the four groups of high-tech firms which are classified into four categories labeled as MT, technology orientation (TO), market orientation (MO) and conservative (CO) firms. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 360 high-tech firms in China. MANOVA was used to identify whether or not new product innovation activities (i.e. timing of market entry and product quality) and performance vary across the four groups. Findings – The results indicate that the four groups of firms significantly differ with respect to new product performance and with new product innovation activities pertaining to timing of market-entry strategy and product quality. Further, the results show that first, MT firms have highest new product performance; second, TO firms are speed leaders which have first-to-market with new product; and third, MO firms are quality champions which are best for the perceived new product quality. Originality/value – This paper responds to call for synthetic studies of multiple orientations and cross-disciplinary research, especially in the areas of marketing and strategic management. This paper is the first to integrate MO and TO and examine the interactive effects of these two orientations on new product innovation. Against prior study believing the combination of strategic orientations play an important role in innovation management, the findings that TO firms are speed leaders and MO firms are quality champions suggest that the combination of different strategic orientations is not beneficial to all respects of new product innovation, such as timing of market-entry strategy and product quality.

Purpose In today’s global competition, supply chain quality management is the key to a firms’ competitiveness. However, managers find that making sound quality and pricing decisions under a complex multi-echelon in the current competitive electronic commerce environment is daunting and challenging. The purpose of this paper is to examine the optimum quality strategies under different cooperative mechanisms and investigate its effects on channel members’ profits. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a result of a China-UK collaborative research effort, involving researchers with expertise in information systems, quality management, supply chain management, pricing, and game theory models. The authors consider the quality decisions of a single product in a supply chain system that consists of a supplier and two competing manufacturers. The authors examine the optimum quality strategies under different cooperative mechanisms and investigate its effects on channel members’ profits. A modified Nerlove-Arrow model is employed to investigate the quality levels on goodwill and product sales. Findings The results reveal that the traditional cooperative program is not very effective in the horizontal competitive market; and each channel member may have a profit improvement when the supplier integrates with a manufacturer. Originality/value The authors believe that this paper will contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Moreover, the paper provides insights for managers to better manage their supply chain quality management in an information-centric context.

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In the virtual network environment, the C2C e-commerce has some problems in product quality, service, credit speculation. At present the credit appraisal system offered by domestic C2C ecommerce website ensures the network security to a certain extent while it has some problems in identity verification, evaluation rules and model, credit of buyers and sellers and so on. Focused on the largest national C2C shopping website-Taobao, this article mainly analyzes the present situations and problems of the credit appraisal system, puts forward some improved suggestions of the real-name authentication, credit and transaction appraisal rules and so forth, and then establishes improved credit appraisal system.