Vol. 7 No. 1 (2014): January - June

EDITORIAL

In this issue of the Journal of Operations and Supply Chain Management, we have five articles that cover relevant areas of our field, with a strong focus on the Brazilian economic setting.

Two of our articles look at innovation from different perspectives.

The article "Institutional barriers for food innovation: A study of the Brazilian functional food industry", by Guilherme Oliveira, Luciana Vieira, Márcia de Barcellos e Alexia Hoppe, explores the challenge of innovation within the supply chain of a specific industry: functional ingredients. It highlights a possible negative impact of the regulatory agency in Brazil and the relevance of institutional factors and partnerships on innovation.

The article "Determinants of consolidation of interorganizational cooperation network: a case study of Brazilian Wine Industry", by Cláudio Zancan, Paulo da Cruz Freire dos Santos and Nicholas Joseph Tavares da Cruz takes the perspective of innovation networks. It identifies the main conditioning factors that promoted the consolidation of the association of wine producers of a wine-growing region in the south of Brazil.

The other three articles look at supply chain management at three different levels of analysis from its most fundamental unit, the dyad, through the agglomeration of related companies, to the global supply chain phenomenon.

At the micro level, the article "Dyad buyer-supplier and its relation to financial performance" by Luis Mondini, Denise del Prá Netto Machado and Márcia Scarpin, looks at the effect of three supply chain practices within a dyad (strategic sourcing; supplier evaluation system; and buyer-supplier relationship) on financial performance. Their sample of 174 Brazilian companies offers a good picture of the impact of these practices on performance in an emerging country setting.

The meso level is covered by the article "Logistic service providers in Brazil: a study of geographical clustering from the perspective of logistics chain integration", by Dimária Silva e Meirelles, Mário Fernandes da Costa and José Carlos Thomaz, looking at the supply chain aspects within a cluster. It provides a map of the 922 spatial concentration of logistics service providers in Brazil.

The article "Brazil moving up in the semiconductor global chain", by Marco Antônio Viana Borges and Luciana Vieira, looks at the supply chain from the broader perspective of global chains. It describes the configuration of this important global chain and how Brazilian companies are part of this configuration.  Although some Brazilian companies already operate in high-value added activities others are limited to less attractive sectors. The institutional barriers like infrastructure, education, and the lack of a proper industrial policy are identified and described.

I wish our readers an informative and pleasant reading!

Luiz Artur Ledur Brito

Editor-in-chief