In the knowledge economy, the analysis of intangible resources affects an organization's value and growth. Both the choosing of the appropriate evaluation models and the critical factors for intangible assets are the most difficult issues to deal with. The first purpose of this study employs five evaluation models to compute the intangible value of IC design houses in US and Taiwan. The results show that the value of IC design houses in US is higher than Taiwanese by market capital methods. In contrast, the value of Taiwanese IC design houses is more consistent with the return of asset methods comparing to that of US firms. The second purpose of this paper is to investigate the compositions of intangible assets between Taiwanese and American IC design industry. We constructed 26 items from financial and intellectual capital aspects. Results of factor analysis indicated 8 main attributes of intangible value. Results of stepwise regression indicated that current profitability attributes are the most important ones associated with the intangible value in Taiwan, and research performance are the most important ones in US. These findings suggest that US design houses is more long-term running oriented than Taiwanese short-term oriented.

Taiwan's Integrated Circuit (IC) industry is of particular interest due to its increasing global importance and its unique, virtually integrated infrastructure. This study was conducted to examine the strategy-performance consequences of strategic group membership and attempted empirically to investigate the relationship between the profitability of Taiwan's IC firms (dependent variables) and both firms' business strategies (virtual integration versus IDM) and industrial business cycles (contingent variable). Data was taken from the Taiwan's Integrated Circuit industry for the period 1994-2001. Significant and interesting results were obtained. First, the main factor of business models significantly affects a firm's profitability and the variation over time. Secondly, the significance of the effect of the business models was still found when the variable of business cycle was included. It implied that the effectiveness of virtual integration to increase a firm's return on assets and return on equity existed at any stage of business cycles. An increasing number of independent IC design firms worldwide seem to support the findings of this study. However, the IDM firms may still exist due to their strategic commitment though the virtually integrated firms have higher profitability.

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