Competitive priorities, process innovations and time‐based competition in the manufacturing sectors of industrialising economies

The topic of competitive priorities has attracted many of those interested in manufacturing strategy and stimulated a number of surveys in manufacturing industry. Much of this empirical work concentrates on large companies in industrialised economies while asserting the general applicability of findings. In contrast the survey reported here was conducted in a newly industrialising country, Turkey, focusing on small to medium‐sized manufacturing enterprises. Key personnel in 41 companies were questioned about the priorities of cost, quality, flexibility and, in particular, time. Process innovations, since these enable improvements in competitive priorities, were also examined. General similarities were evident between the Turkish, other European, and US situations. However, certain elements of quality and time were not ranked as highly in Turkey and the adoption levels of process innovations were lower. In contrast to US data, connections between competitiveness and time‐related performance measures were not apparent. Conclusions were drawn that Turkish manufacturing industry was generally at an earlier, quality‐dependent, stage in developing competitiveness and that time‐based competition was not yet evident.