8
based on the potential role of firm size, we added data on total sales revenue and employees
available from the
proff.nodatabase as a proxy for firm size.
Supply chain:
Firms in different places in the supply chain are likely to draw upon different types of
knowledge and experience, participate in different parts of the markets for OWP or PV, and export
different types of products and services. It was therefore important to us to place each respondent in
the supply chains so that any commonalities or variations across the entire supply chains could be
identified. We initially recorded which areas each firm offered products or services according to a
pre-defined list put together based on previous studies of OWP and PV industries (Hanson 2013;
Multiconsult 2012; Navigant 2013; Steen & Hansen 2014; Wieczorek et al. 2013). We subsequently
aggregated the lists for OWP and PV to fit with a smaller set of supply chain categories, which we
present in sectio
n 5.1.1.For firms that deliver products or services to more than one part of the supply chain, we initially
categorised these firms in multiple places along the supply chain (i.e. many OWP firms deliver both
installation and maintenance services). However, for the purpose of our analysis we wanted to be able
to categorise each firm in only one place in the supply chain. To do so, we used the initial response
recorded in the survey in addition to available information about each firm (company websites, news
archives, annual reports and public registries) to place respondents in what we judged to be the
primary supply chain category. We recognise that there is a potential weakness in manually modifying
the survey data in this way. Nevertheless, the categorisation that we have been able to do as a result
opens up for new insights with regards to the distribution of firms across the supply chains and
characteristics of firms in different categories
Barriers:
From the literature on internationalisation and industry formation, we identified eight
potential barriers and we asked the respondents to indicate whether they experienced these to pose
challenges for their ability to succeed in the markets for OWP and PV. The literature on the role of
home markets led us to include barriers related to testing and verification of products, distance to
markets and access to customers. We also included potential barriers related to the mobilisation of
different resources, such as capital, based on the potential importance of this as a process in industry
formation.
Success criteria:
The survey also included questions about the importance of different criteria for
success. Based on ideas that industries or segments (parts of supply chain) that are comparatively more
standardised rely less on a home market, we here included price and quality as two of these criteria.
The rationale was that firms relying more on price than on quality (or other criteria) supply products