Latecomer firms and the emergence and development of knowledge networks: The case of Petrobras in Brazil

This paper addresses the emergence and development of firm-centred knowledge networks within learning and innovation systems in late-industrialising countries. A key contribution of the paper is conceptual and methodological: the development of an original typology of knowledge network properties to trace out changes in the form of networks as they evolve over time. A second contribution consists in providing an example of the application of the typology by examining the emergence and development of a firm-centred knowledge network in the case of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company over more than 30 years between the late 1960s and the early 2000s. This demonstrates that the properties of Petrobras’ knowledge networks continuously evolved through a succession of stages towards (i) increasing intentionality in the management decision-making underlying network development, (ii) growing complexity and diversity in selected cognitive characteristics, and (iii) greater complementarity in the division of innovative labour between Petrobras and its network partners. These original results from applying the typology, in conjunction with retrospective historical methods, illustrate only one aspect of its potential value in the analysis of knowledge networks in late-industrialising economies: tracking out organisational evolution over long periods of time. Others include the comparative examination of network differences across different circumstances and the analysis of relationships between changes/differences in network properties and other characteristics of learning/innovation systems and their contexts.     

Impact of public and private research funding on scientific production: The case of nanotechnology

This article measures the impact of public grants, private contracts and collaboration on the scientific production of Canadian nanotechnology academics. The paper estimates a time-related model of the impact of academic research financing and network structure on the research output of individual academics measured by the number of papers. Results suggest that the effect of individual public funding follows a J-shaped curve. Although contracts have no effects, the impact of patenting follows an inverted-U shaped curve. In addition, a strong central position in the past collaborative network has a positive effect on research output.     

Novelty-oriented value propositions for new technology-based firms: Impact of business networks and growth orientation

To perform, new technology-based firms (NTBFs) need to develop value for customers that distinguish them from others in the market. Therefore, the development of novelty-oriented value propositions are important, and may be influenced by several factors. We argue that the propensity to become more novelty-oriented can be influenced by an internal drive to grow (growth orientation) and by external contributions (business networks). Hence, the purpose of this paper is to analyse how business networks and growth orientation effects on the novelty orientation of NTBF value propositions. Based on survey data from 401 NTBFs founded between 2013 and 2015, in the nascent start-up phase novelty-oriented value propositions of NTBFs positively relate to informal (management) networks, as well as founders' attitudes towards growth. Thus, such networks and attitudes from founders should be supported in the very early phases of start-up if novelty orientation is to be preferred as a performance determinant.     

A platform-based approach to ambidexterity for innovation: An empirical investigation in the public sector

Innovation in the public sector plays an important role in improving the quality of public services and addressing economic and societal challenges. Most of the previous research on innovations has focused on the private sector. How organizations may achieve ambidexterity for innovations in the public sector characterized by unique constraints has been largely underexplored. Platforms have emerged as key components in organizations’ approaches to innovation. Using an empirical study in a public sector organization, this study identifies a platform-based approach that can be used to achieve ambidexterity in balancing exploitative and exploratory innovations in the public sector. Organizations facing constraints pertaining to structure, risk, and value may benefit from considering their product/service development, process management, and value formulation through this approach. This study also identifies practices in platform development, appropriation, and control that contributed to the success of the platform-based approach.     

Advancing innovation in the public sector: Aligning innovation measurement with policy goals

There is sufficient evidence, drawn from surveys of innovation in the public sector and cognitive testing interviews with public sector managers, to develop a framework for measuring public sector innovation. Although many questions that are covered in the Oslo Manual guidelines for measuring innovation in the private sector can be applied with some modifications to the public sector, public sector innovation surveys need to meet policy needs that require collecting additional types of data. Policy to support public sector innovation requires data on how public sector organizations innovate and how a strategic management approach to innovation can influence the types of innovations that are developed. Both issues require innovations surveys to delve deeply into the innovation processes and strategies that are used by public sector managers. Implementation of the measurement framework proposed in this paper would open up opportunities for a new, policy-relevant research program on public sector innovation.     

The future of value creation and innovations: Aspects of a theory of value creation and innovation in a global knowledge economy

What enhances innovation and value creation in the global knowledge economy? We offer several answers here, chief among them this: Leaders need to move away from focusing on developing innovations and value within the mental models, systems, and organizational solutions of the old industrial economy, with its firm- and product-centric view of value. Instead, they need to focus on providing tailor-made products and services to the newly connected and interconnected customer. They can do this with individualized immediate feedback, a new organizational logic, and new cooperating structures.     

Codified-tacit and general-specific knowledge in the division of labour among firms: A study of the software industry

This paper explores the organisation and codification of knowledge in software firms. It analyses various economic incentives to codification, including the need to improve the productivity and quality of software production and the networks of inter-firm alliances.The paper examines the experience of five Italian software firms specialising in software packages and services. It compares their capabilities, main sources of tacit knowledge, specific incentives to invest in knowledge codification and the formal development methodologies and quality control systems adopted. Finally, the paper analyses two distinct technological collaborations that two of these firms have recently established.     

Innovating strategically in information and knowledge management: Applications of organizational behavior theory

A business school declares its strategy as becoming a leading European institution. As main vehicle for achieving recognition is the implementation of a top-down strategy naming five academic fields as key – (a) finance, (b) economics, (c) marketing, (d) law, accounting, and auditing, and (e) organizational behavior (OB). Top management allocates resources for research, academic activities, and positions to these five strategically chosen areas. Academic areas that are not strategically named must generate their own income through educational programs and research grants. Can OB serve as the platform to ensure the survival of IS/KMS? In our analysis, we found no other business school formulating a strategy along these lines; dominating strategic themes are internationalization, research excellence, and student environment. No academic field is singled out as strategic. We argue that selecting a few academic areas as a strategy is dysfunctional. We also found that OB is not very actively employed in research, be it positioning, theory, research model, analysis, or discussion. Hence, we do not find that OB offers any theorizing help to IS/KMS – this in contrast to innovation and change theories, for which we propose an framework as a means of defining IS/KMS research projects.     

Factors affecting attitudes and intentions towards knowledge sharing in the Dubai Police Force

This study contributes to the limited research base on knowledge sharing in public sector organisations, specifically police forces, and organisations in the Middle East through a case study investigation into the factors that affect knowledge sharing in the Dubai Police Force. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted with staff in key departments in the Dubai Police Force. Informed by the literature and by interviews conducted in a previous phase, the core of the questionnaire was a bank of Likert-style questions covering the dependent variables intention to knowledge share, and attitude towards knowledge sharing, and the independent variables, trust, organisational structure, leadership, reward, time, and information technology. Data was analysed using structured equation modelling, in order to test the measurement model using confirmatory factor analysis, and to test the structural model. The structural model suggests a strong relationship between attitude to knowledge sharing, and intention to share knowledge. Hypotheses regarding the influence of leadership, trust, organisational structure, time, and information technology on attitude to knowledge sharing were upheld. Rewards did not to influence attitude to knowledge sharing. Recommendations are offered for practice and further research.     

降低创新创业的知识产权成本研究——基于佛山与主要城市比较视角

采用定性与定量相结合的方法,深入分析比较佛山与宁波、无锡、大连、长沙、东莞等先进城市的知识产权成本,认为佛山知识产权成本在6个城市中,大体处于中游水平,专利补助与无锡、大连并列第3;佛山知识产权运营服务走在全国前列,专利诉讼资助力度与长沙等先进城市还有一定差距;在知识产权保护方面,佛山还需要进一步增强,在处理知识产权侵权纠纷、提高公众的知识产权保护意识等方面不断改进和完善,努力降低知识产权成本,为佛山创新创业"保驾护航"。     

The relationship between perceived value and information source use during KM strategic decision-making: A study of 17 Chinese business managers

The study explores the relationship between value attribution and information source use of 17 Chinese business managers during their knowledge management (KM) strategic decision-making. During semi-structured interviews, the Chinese business managers, half in the telecommunications sector and half in the manufacturing sector, were asked to rate 16 information sources on five-point Likert Scales. The 16 information sources were grouped into internal–external and personal–impersonal types. The participants rated the information sources according to five value criteria: relevancy, comprehensiveness, reliability, time/effort, and accessibility. Open-ended questions were also asked to get at how and why value attribution affected the participants’ use of one information source over another during decision-making. Findings show that the participants preferred internal–personal type of information sources over external–impersonal information sources. The differences in value ratings per information source were striking: Telecommunications managers rated customers, newspapers/magazines, and conferences/trips much lower than the manufacturing managers but they rated corporate library/intranet and databases much higher than manufacturing managers. The type of industrial sector therefore highly influenced information source use for decision-making by the study’s Chinese business managers. Based on this conclusion, we added organizational and environmental categories to revise the De Alwis, Majid, and Chaudhry’s (2006) typology of factors affecting Chinese managers’ information source preferences during decision-making.     

Technology cross-fertilization and the business model: The case of integrating ICTs in mechanical engineering products

This paper investigates the increasing interdependency among different bodies of knowledge in products, from the technology opportunities arising from ‘cross-fertilizing’, and how firms try to appropriate economic value from their technical potential. The study is based on three multi-national corporations, and their integration of information and communication technologies into established mechanical engineering products. The case studies show how technology cross-fertilization needs to be accompanied by business model changes in order to achieve increased economic value. While much attention has been given to the input dimension of multi-technology products, the economic and commercial domains have been rather ignored in previous literature. This work contributes to the management literature by linking the input resources with the market output for creating and appropriating value from technology cross-fertilization.     

Public and private value creation using artificial intelligence: An empirical study of AI voice robot users in Chinese public sector

Despite significant theoretical and empirical attention on public value creation in the public sector, the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) use and value creation from the citizen perspective remains poorly understood. We ground our study in Moore’s public value management to examine the relationship between AI use and value creation. We conceptually categorize public service value into public value and private value. We use procedural justice and trust in government as indicators of public value and, based on motivation theory, we use perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment as indicators of private value. A field survey of 492 AI voice robot users in China was conducted to test our model. The results indicated that the effective use of AI voice robots was significantly associated with private value and procedural justice. However, the relationship between the effective use of AI and trust in government was not found to be significant. Surprisingly, the respondents indicated that private value had a greater effect on overall value creation than public value. This contrasts with the common idea that value creation from the government perspective suggests that social objectives requiring public value are more important to citizens. The results also show that gender and citizens with different experiences show different AI usage behaviors.     

On the relationship between environmental management, environmental innovation and patenting: Evidence from German manufacturing firms

This paper analyses empirically the relationship between environmental innovations, environmental management and patenting. In particular it tests a number of propositions on how environmental management systems and the interaction with environmentally more or less concerned stakeholders are associated with the probability of firms to pursue innovation in general (measured as patenting behaviour) and specifically environmental innovation (measured based on firm self-assessment and through patent data). In applying a negative binomial as well as binary discrete choice models the relationship is studied using data on German manufacturing firms. As a novel and important insight, the study finds that environmental innovation can be meaningfully identified using patent data and that environmental innovation defined this way is less ubiquitous than self-reported environmental innovation. It also reveals that the implementation level of environmental management systems has a positive effect exclusively on environmental process innovation, whereas it is negatively associated with the level of a firms’ general patenting activities. For environmental product innovation and patented environmental innovations a positive relationship with environmentally concerned and a negative link with environmentally neutral stakeholders is found.     

National health innovation systems: Clustering the OECD countries by innovative output in healthcare using a multi indicator approach

The importance of innovation in healthcare has increased within the last decades as challenges, like rising costs and an aging demographic, have to be solved. The degree of innovativeness in healthcare is strongly influenced by the National Health Innovation System, which as a sectoral innovation system encompasses a wide variety of actors and related knowledge. Despite the highly practical relevance of the topic, there are only a few studies that analyze innovation in healthcare on a national level. Thus, this study is a starting point and, building on the theoretical framework of national innovation systems, answers the following questions: “Can countries be grouped by their innovation output in healthcare and do those groups differ in factors describing the healthcare system? Do countries with strong national innovation systems also have strong national health innovation systems and vice versa?” We compare the healthcare innovation output of 30 OECD countries using a multi-indicator approach and categorize them into four distinct groups using cluster analysis. The cluster consisting of the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Switzerland shows the highest innovation output measured in knowledge production and knowledge commercialization. Surprisingly, these countries, with the exception of Switzerland, only rank in the medium group when considering the entire national innovation system. Policymakers and researchers might be particularly interested in studying the healthcare systems of these countries.     

Regulatory policy, value of knowledge assets and innovation strategy: The case of the Orphan Drug Act

The U.S. Orphan Drug Act provides R&D incentives to drug-makers that go beyond statutory patent protection. The study explores the act's effect on financial returns to innovation and on the strategy of orphan drug development. Results indicate that the financial return to orphan drug development is positive. The findings suggest that when market size is small and cumulative innovation is an important phenomenon the policy that extends effective patent duration or subsidizes R&D activity improves incentives to innovate.     

The innovative performance of firms in heterogeneous environments: The interplay between external knowledge and internal absorptive capacities

This paper investigates the link between firm-level innovative performance and innovation prone external environments where knowledgeable individuals tend to cluster. Organizational ambidexterity and absorptive capacities (potential and realized) make it possible for firms to leverage the availability of external knowledge and boost their innovation performance. The empirical analysis focuses on England and is based on a novel combination of Community Innovation Survey (CIS) firm-level data and patent data. The results show that only firms complementing potential and realized absorptive capacities are able to take advantage of favorable external environments by actively combining internal and external sources of knowledge.     

Facing the problem of unbalanced development of knowledge across sectors and fields: the case of the knowledge base in primary education

This paper aims at developing a framework to analyse the structure and the dynamics of the knowledge base in the education sector. The main purpose is to explain why the creation and circulation of knowledge do not work well and what kind of transformations should be implemented at the system level to improve the process of knowledge advances. Three main issues are at stake: the interface between science (in this case, the educational research) and technology (the practical knowledge used by teachers), the low level of codification, which hampers the access to and the expansion of the professional knowledge base and the incentive problems posed by the need for knowledge and innovation diffusion across classrooms and schools.     

Knowledge and learning in the horticultural innovation system: A case of Kashmir valley of India

The system of innovation (SI) in the agriculture sector, termed as Agricultural Innovation System (AIS), is one of the most recent trends in innovation research, especially in the developing economies. This approach considers several factors such as actors, complex networks and learning, socio-cultural and political factors that affect the innovation process within a dynamic system. Using the AIS approach, the present paper explores the knowledge and learning interactions in the horticultural sector of Kashmir Valley of India, which offers a mix of both formal and informal activities. The research methodology is qualitative in nature based on both primary and secondary data. For primary data collection, apple growers, private and government sector actors were interviewed and secondary data is based on various reports and published materials related to the apple production in Kashmir. The analysis explores the interactions of knowledge production by formal and informal means in the horticultural sector specifically focusing on the informal ways. In the study, taking the case of canker disease treatment in apple trees by informal ways depicts the productive use of informal knowledge in the horticultural system. It was observed that many factors (social networks, life-long experiences, learning, coordination and group interactions) affect the informal knowledge generation process and the connectivity between formal and informal actors is lagging in the horticulture sector.     

National institutions, public-private knowledge flows, and innovation performance: A comparative study of the biotechnology industry in the US and France

The biotechnology industry is a striking example of the disconnect between the location of knowledge creation and its commercial development. I argue that national technological performance in biotechnology is critically affected by institutions governing scientific careers, which shape the professional identities and boundary-spanning activities of research scientists. I test this in a comparison of the United States and France. Drawing on fieldwork and analysis of patent data, I compare institutional frameworks and estimate models of forward patent citations. The models show that entrepreneurial firms are associated with high-performing innovations in this sector whereas large established firms perform poorly in both countries, and highlight the importance of institutions in creating country-specific combinations of human capital with organizational capabilities.