Purpose: Guanxi, an invisible aspect of many levels of interaction in economic life, has increased in importance in recent years; however, this subject has been underappreciated in high-tech industries. High-tech firms can choose to use guanxi with their partners as a key component of their competitive advantage or to view guanxi as necessary evil that is required to complete business exchanges. This paper aims to evaluate how guanxi contributes to or impedes a high-tech firm’s innovation performance.Design/methodology/approach: This study proposes and tests a nonlinear model that explores the positive and negative impact of guanxi on the innovation performance using a sample of 184 high-tech firms located in Taiwan Science Park.Findings: In contrast to the mainstream of findings in the previous literature, the authors find that guanxi is a competitive advantage in constructing new business networks; however, additional increase of guanxi may even decrease innovation performance. This view opens up new research avenues in the context of high-tech industries and suggests directions for future research and practice.Research limitations/implications: Academics and practitioners know little about the unfavorable aspects of this variable. Future studies might develop specific measurement scales that capture the negative side of strong guanxi. Beyond the positive side of variables that have been amply studied, such as affection and kindness, other interesting negative side of variables that may be considered in future studies are blood (Tsang, 1998), extortion (Dunfee and Warren, 2001) and favoritism (Hwanget al., 2009).Originality/value: The authors contribute to the research on guanxi and innovation performance, in that this study extends guanxi literature beyond the intuitive conclusion that innovation performance can be significantly enhanced in Asian countries’ business networks by leveraging guanxi as competitive advantage, and further demonstrating when and how guanxi can be harmful for high-tech firms’ innovation performance.

This study evaluated the effects of reading text on an optical see-through head-mounted display during treadmill walking in a virtual environment. Thirty participants were recruited to perform Chinese reading tasks by reading six types of text layouts in two polarity settings. A virtual environment was displayed on a projection screen to simulate a walking situation in which obstacles were encountered. High- and low-density obstacles were applied. Objective measures included reading performance, gait variability, and the error count of obstacles. The subjective measures were the situational awareness rating technique (SART) and NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) scores. The results indicated that font size and polarity affected the gait variability, reading performance, situational awareness, and mental workload ratings. The obstacle density affects gait variability and situation awareness rating. The layout with 32-point text and positive polarity yielded faster reading speed, better subjective ratings, and less variability in minimum foot clearance.

Since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the epidemic has gradually slowed down in various countries and people’s lives have gradually returned to normal. To monitor the spread of the epidemic, studies discussing the design of related healthcare information systems have been increasing recently. However, these studies might not consider the aspect of user-centric design when developing healthcare information systems. This study examined these innovative technology applications and rapidly built prototype systems for smart healthcare through a systematic literature review and a study of patient innovation. The design guidelines for the Smart Healthcare System (SHS) were then compiled through an expert review process. This will provide a reference for future research and similar healthcare information system development.