An Examination of the Relationships between Environmental Scanning and Competitive Strategy under WTO Framework

Some even mentioned about moving their business abroad, especially to Mainland China. Because they were worrying about the future of Taiwan since Taiwan has faced economic recession for the past years. From strategic management literature, we can find that environmental scanning is the first and most important step for a business to formulate competitive strategy.

However, in Taiwan, some businesses scarcely scanned and analyzed the environment that they were familiar with. On the contrary, we saw that a lot of businesses were lost in the changing world and relied heavily on scholars or experts for the future prediction. To explore how Taiwanese manufacturing firms scan their environment, the responses about Taiwan’s joining in WTO, and how they formulate competitive strategies to challenge the forthcoming keen competition, the author plans to survey the companies located in Taiwan Industrial Park.

The structured-questionnaires will be mailed the firms to collect the information. The study expects the following results: (1) The responses the firms have on Taiwan’s joining in WTO. (2) How the firms scan the changing environment: what kind of sources they use and what kind of information they collect?

(3) How the firms formulate the competitive strategies? What is the formulation process? (4) A comparison among the industries for the different views and strategies.