Soccer ball production faces serious challenges over production cost, quality
September 09, 2016
Pakistan’s soccer ball production is facing serious challenges like increasing production cost and quality issue because of the soccer industry’s workers resistance to new technology, reveals a survey by Lahore School of Economics.
All of Pakistan’s soccer ball production is concentrated in Sialkot, which remains the major source for the world’s hand stitched soccer balls. In recent years the industry has faced increasing competition from East Asian countries, especially China, which has hurt exporters.
Read more »Labels: Export, Football, Industrial Policy, Industrial Technology, Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan, Research
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 9/09/2016 02:04:00 PM,
Organizational Barriers to Adoption of New Technology
October 26, 2015
An experiment in the production of soccer balls suggests that sharing production gains with workers helps firms embrace change.
Slow diffusion of promising new technology has long been the bane of inventors, innovators, company owners, and enterprising employees who recognize opportunities to improve productivity. In Organizational Barriers to Technology Adoption: Evidence from Soccer-ball Producers in Pakistan (NBER Working Paper No. 21417), David Atkin, Azam Chaudhry, Shamyla Chaudry, Amit K. Khandelwal, and Eric Verhoogen explore reasons for resistance to change.
A traditional soccer ball has 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons cut from sheets of artificial leather known as rexine. A metal die and hydraulic press are used to cut the panels from laminated rexine sheets. In the course of their research on the soccer ball industry, Verhoogen and his wife, Annalisa Guzzini, an architect, discovered a new die design (based on a cutting pattern from a YouTube video of a Chinese factory) that allowed more pentagons to be cut from each rexine sheet, thus reducing waste and improving efficiency in the production process. The new technology was calculated to reduce production costs by 1 percentage point in an industry with an average profit margin of only 8 percentage points–an unambiguous benefit to ball-manufacturing companies.
Labels: Football, Industrial Technology, Research
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 10/26/2015 10:23:00 AM,
Innovation and Technology Center of the Lahore School of Economics Launches Sialkot Football Project
August 22, 2015
The researchers of the Lahore School’s Innovation and Technology Center launched a novel rexine subsidy project on 12 August 2015 in order to help Sialkot football manufacturers overcome the high cost of imported rexine. In this project more than 70 firms from the Sialkot football sector were invited to an event in which 30 firms were selected to receive high value vouchers from the Lahore School of Economics that can be used to purchase high-quality foreign Rexine at a large discount.
Dr. Azam Amjad Chaudhry of the Lahore School of Economics formally launches Sialkot football rexine project
This initiative has been launched under the newly established Innovation and Technology Center of the Lahore School of Economics. This Innovation and Technology Center will conduct cutting edge research on the role of innovation and technology in the economic growth and development. The research team at the Lahore School of Economics has been conducting internationally recognized research on technology in the football sector in Sialkot for the last 5 years with the support of the Government of Punjab and the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce. This research has been jointly conducted by researchers at the Lahore School of Economics, Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Innovation and Technology center is currently engaged in an international project to benchmark technology and productivity in the Pakistani garments sector and will also benchmark technology and productivity in the Sialkot football sector and the Sialkot surgical goods sector.
Read more »Labels: Football, Industrial Technology, Research
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 8/22/2015 12:59:00 PM,
We don't hate change, but sometimes change hates us
June 10, 2014
You would think from our rapidly obsolete laptops and ever updating phones that all new technology spreads at a breakneck pace.
You would be wrong.
“People who’ve studied technology adoption have often been struck by how slow it is,” says Eric Verhoogen, an Associate Professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. “The technologies that make the news are the ones that move fast, but many cases -- including basic industrial technology -- have taken a long time to diffuse.”
Read more »Labels: FIFA, Football, Industrial Technology, Innovation, Lahore School, Research
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 6/10/2014 09:40:00 AM,
Pakistan’s football factories score goal for innovation
June 03, 2014
Pakistan’s football-making industry is benefitting from a new technology which allows balls to be made more efficiently, thanks to research funded by the International Growth Centre (IGC), based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Researchers found a new way to cut the footballs' pentagon panels from sheets of an artificial leather, rexine – the most costly input into football production.
Read more »Labels: Football, Industrial Technology, Innovation, Lahore School, Research
posted by S A J Shirazi @ 6/03/2014 08:30:00 AM,
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