臺大管理論叢 NTU Management Review VOL.29 NO.1

Exploring Dual Business Model Choice of Brand and OEM Businesses 58 studied involved a different BM, we focused on exploring the choice of dual BM for each product line and the corresponding business synergies, external competitive landscape, and internal capabilities. The case we studied is a typical Taiwan-based company (AV-Firm, hereafter) (Yin, 1994). Many Taiwanese firms adopt dual BMs to develop their business. AV-Firm was founded in 1990 and positioned itself as an innovative product provider in audio and video with the aim of enriching people’s entertainment and communication. AV-Firm has developed and launched numerous product lines with unique value propositions since its founding and successfully boosted its business growth. This led to the company being listed in the Taiwan stock market in 1997. Currently, AV-Firm is very competitive in video signal compression and conversion technology across multiple interfaces and has received more than 500 patents based on the efforts of its 500 plus engineers. While AV-Firm has established 10 international offices to market its products across 70 countries, it also engaged in contractual relationships with brand companies such as HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Acer, and NEC, to which it provided design and manufacturing services. Internally, AV-Firm regarded this as “Value plus ODM (original design and manufacturing)” business. AV-Firm is a revelatory case for qualitative research. We focused on the richness and accessibility of the case, rather than the randomness of sample selection (Yin, 1994). AV-Firm, having evolved during the past two decades, provided a rich business configuration and retrievable quantitative and qualitative data at the product line level. This helped us build theoretical insights based on replication logic across various product lines. Thus, theoretical generalization was more feasible (Hallen and Eisenhardt, 2012). We purposely identified four product lines of AV-firm for our case-based exploration. Table 1 describes the research setting for these four product lines, in the industries of education, PCs, telecommunications, and security. These product lines all adopt dual BMs and constitute the main revenue stream for the focal company. This setting was attractive because of the emergence of industry confluence with numerous global brand and OEM business collaborations. In addition, two product lines were first movers and the other two were late movers in their market segments. Further, the product lines have been marketed for 17, 22, 5, and 8 years, respectively; hence, we could access detailed data for a longitudinal study. In sum, AV-Firm is a typical, revelatory, and longitudinal case, and ideal for researchers’ exploration.