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Over the past decade, the markets for mobile and wireless services have been among the world's fastest-growing, especially in Asian countries, presenting financial institutions with significant opportunities to offer value-added services. Mobile banking has since emerged as a new channel enabling the banks to react strategically to changes in competitive forces and to enhance customer convenience. Based on Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB) model, this study develops an integrated model to provide a fuller understanding of factors facilitating or impeding the adoption of mobile banking, focusing on consumers in Taiwan and Vietnam. While subjective norms had a significant effect on the intention to adopt, three attributes of mobile banking (compatibility, perceived usefulness, and perceived risk) were found to have indirect effects on intention to adopt mobile banking through attitude toward adoption for consumers in both Taiwan and Vietnam. Intention to adopt mobile banking was indirectly influenced by self-efficacy and facilitating conditions, and directly affected by perceived behavioral control in both nations. Some differences in intention to adopt mobile banking between Taiwanese and Vietnamese are also discussed. Based on the research findings, managerial implications for financial institutions and mobile service providers are discussed.

The continuously evolving IC industry has driven IC design service companies to become the niche players in the semiconductor value chain. These emerging companies, mostly SMEs, manage the entire chip development manufacturing process and apply third party's resources when and where its customers need them. To keep the customer as their main focus and deliver what the customer truly needs, a strong and committed partnership ecosystem is more important than ever. The objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the partnership ecosystem of Taiwan's IC design service companies. A co-evolutionary theory in the business ecosystem is used as a theoretical background to explain the relationship in the investigated partnership networks. The partnership networks of the IC design service companies were analyzed together with the corporate data such as revenues and milestones. The findings show that the firms have accumulated and created their competitive advantage by forming strategic alliances with various leading foundries, IP vendors, and EDA tool providers to leverage their technological capabilities. While the production ecosystem was localized in Taiwan based on the benefit of the complete value chain, the IP ecosystem was more internationalized. The existing networks provide a new insight into opportunities for new entrants even in the highly competitive environment like the semiconductor industry. This study contributes to the understanding of the characteristics of the niche players. It will be useful as policy implications for the industry stakeholders and governments to setup direction for further support and investment in the IC design service business.

The rapid evolution of mobile technologies and the increasing diffusion of smartphones have given significant opportunities for innovative companies to create new payment solutions and offer value-added services to their customers. Near Field Communication (NFC) mobile payment has been emerging as a noticeable phenomenon that can enable consumers to turn their smartphones into digital wallets. Although there has been a lot of coverage on consumer acceptance of mobile payments, there are only few researches providing guideline to interpret NFC-based mobile payments adoption. Taking into consideration of theoretical backgrounds of innovation diffusion and specific characteristics of NFC mobile payments, this study proposes a research framework to provide a profound understanding of factors facilitating or impeding the adoption of NFC-based mobile payments among Taiwanese consumers. The results revealed that intention to adopt NFC mobile payments is affected by most of product-related factors, personal-related factors and attractiveness of alternatives. This paper is able to advance literature on innovation adoption and facilitate technology marketers in NFC mobile payments. It provides a useful guideline to help researchers investigate issues related to NFC mobile payments. It also brings some managerial implications by assisting relevant parties in NFC mobile payments ecosystem such as mobile network operators, card issuers, payment processing institutions, bank decision makers and merchants when devising their business strategies and marketing campaigns to facilitate NFC mobile payments.