| Abstract: | Since Micheal Porter published "Competitive Advantage of Nations" (The Competitive Advantage of Nations) a book in 1990, the book presents the competitive industrial clusters in the country plays an important role, so industrial clusters concept became popular. In the central Taiwan’s tea production area (including Nantou, Taichung, Changhua), the Nantou County has 7,547 hectares of tea production area, the country's largest, occupies 62% of Taiwan's output value as high as 30 billion. If central Taiwan’s tea production by a strategic alliance to further integrate and play cluster effect, will be able to enhance the competitiveness, which was also the main purpose of this paper. This paper follows the Anderson (1994) proposed the concept of industry cluster to construct central Taiwan’s tea production area in the cluster effect of the four dimensions, including "vendor relationships centralized geographic location", "vertically integrated upstream and downstream relationships", " Level of competition between enterprises ", "level of cooperation and resource sharing business relationship " with the 14 indicators. Then Use " Analytic Hierarchy Process,(AHP) " calculate each index weights, further summarized the key success factors in central Taiwan’s tea production area of the industrial cluster effect. The results show that the degree of cluster effect in central Taiwan’s tea production area in sequence as " Zhushan-Lugu tea Area ", " Yuchi tea area ", " Bagua Mountain tea area ", "Lishan tea area", "Yushan tea area", " Renai tea area." The cluster effect dimension weights order to " vendor relationships centralized geographic location ", " level of cooperation and resource sharing business relationship ", " vertically integrated upstream and downstream relationships ", " level of cooperation and resource sharing business relationship ". The first five critical success factors are: tea farmers in the cluster with centralized area, reducing transportation costs fresh tea leaves, tea area farmers joint procurement and use the same source of raw material resources, merchants can closely cooperate with the nearest tea area farmers, tea farmers in the marketing channel region competition.
Keywords: industry cluster, cluster effect, strategic alliances, Analytic Hierarchy Process |
