The impact of R&D spillovers on UK manufacturing TFP: A dynamic panel approach

One of the benefits claimed for investment in Research and Development (R&D) is that there is a spillover effect. Industries benefit from both their own R&D efforts as well as the efforts of other national and overseas industries. The present research presents new evidence on the long-term impact of R&D investment upon UK industry's productivity performance and on the nature of these “R&D spillovers”. The results suggest that R&D efforts from the industry itself and from other national industries have a positive impact on the industry's productivity but, interestingly, there is no gain from foreign R&D investment.     

Distributed R&D, cross-regional knowledge integration and quality of innovative output

We explore the impact of geographic dispersion of a firm's R&D activities on the quality of its innovative output. Using data on over half a million patents from 1127 firms, we find that having geographically distributed R&D per se does not improve the quality of a firm's innovations. In fact, distributed R&D appears to be negatively associated with average value of innovations. This suggests that potential gains from access to diverse ideas and expertise from different locations are, on average, offset by difficulty in achieving integration of knowledge across multiple locations. To investigate whether the innovating teams that do manage cross-fertilization of ideas from different locations achieve more valuable innovations, we analyze innovations for which there is evidence of such knowledge cross-fertilization along any of the followings dimensions: knowledge sourcing from other locations within the firm, having at least one inventor with cross-regional ties, and having at least one inventor that has recently moved from another region. Analysis along all three dimensions consistently reveals a direct positive effect cross-regional knowledge integration has on innovation quality, as well as a positive interaction effect of cross-regional knowledge integration and distributed R&D for innovation quality. More generally, our findings provide new evidence regarding the importance of cross-unit integrative mechanisms for achieving superior performance in multi-unit firms.     

Gaining from interactions with universities: Multiple methods for nurturing absorptive capacity

This paper examines the various methods through which firms benefit from interactions with universities, arguing that such benefits are instrumental in nurturing the multiple facets of a firm's absorptive capacity. We bring together data collected from a survey of UK firms that collaborated with universities, and firm-level data on past partnerships with universities. The results show that benefits from interactions with universities are multifaceted, including enhancement of the firm's explorative and exploitative capabilities. Results also indicate that firms’ R&D commitments, geographical proximity to and research quality of university partners have a distinct impact on the different types of benefits from interactions with universities. We find geographical proximity is crucial for assessing problem-solving as an important benefit, while interactions with top quality universities have a positive influence on the benefits associated with firms’ downstream activities. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and policy.     

Does technological diversification promote innovation?: An empirical analysis for European firms

This paper analyses the impact of technological diversity on innovative activity at the firm level. The empirical study on a panel of European R&D active companies shows that both R&D intensity and patents increase with the degree of technological diversification of the firm. Possible explanations are that, on the one hand, a firm that diversifies its technology can receive more spillovers from other (related) technological fields. On the other hand, diversification can reduce the risk from technological investments and it creates incentives to spend more on R&D. The paper provides empirical evidence relevant to the diversity-specialization innovation debate.     

The paradox of openness: Appropriability,external search and collaboration

To innovate, firms often need to draw from, and collaborate with, a large number of actors from outside their organization. At the same time, firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas. This gives rise to a paradox of openness—the creation of innovations often requires openness, but the commercialization of innovations requires protection. Based on econometric analysis of data from a UK innovation survey, we find a concave relationship between firms’ breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation, and the strength of the firms’ appropriability strategies. We show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search. There is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors. We explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy.     

Glucometers-need for external quality control

We performed a pilot accuracy study on glucometers from three sources: “Advantage” from Boehringer Mannheim (A), “Glucometer^* 4” from Bayer (B) and “One Touch Basic” from Life Scan (C) and compared these results with the results on autoanalyzers-Dimension RxL (1) and Hitachi 704 (2). Each glucometer was tested with venous blood in duplicate, from three different groups of 20 patients each, at random, on three different days, in our outpatient phlebotomy section. The rest of the sample was collected into heparinized tubes & the plasma separated within 15 minutes of sample collection & analyzed on both the analyzers in duplicates. The data were analyzed for accuracy by tabulating the number and percentage of test values that vary from the analyzer (reference) method by 10% or less, by 10% to 20%, or greater than 20% and the results tabulated on the Accuracy Study Table. This being a pilot study and the numbers being small, it may be suggested from the Accuracy Study Table alone, that the results of glucose in whole blood done with glucometer (A) were comparable with that of plasma values without applying any factor; whereas the results with glucometers (B) & (C) need to be divided by 1.11 to be comparable with plasma results; statistically though, results with glucometer (C) were comparable with or without factor. Patients using glucometers need to be alerted about the variance in their glucose results when compared to laboratory results, more clearly by the respective companies in their product inserts. An external quality control material that is glucometer method specific is needed, so that the Clinical Biochemistry laboratory in any hospital setup can more effectively monitor the performance of the glucometers in the wards periodically.     

An integrated model for textual social media data with spatio-temporal dimensions

GPS-enabled devices and social media popularity have created an unprecedented opportunity for researchers to collect, explore, and analyze text data with fine-grained spatial and temporal metadata. In this sense, text, time and space are different domains with their own representation scales and methods. This poses a challenge on how to detect relevant patterns that may only arise from the combination of text with spatio-temporal elements. In particular, spatio-temporal textual data representation has relied on feature embedding techniques. This can limit a model’s expressiveness for representing certain patterns extracted from the sequence structure of textual data. To deal with the aforementioned problems, we propose an Acceptor recurrent neural network model that jointly models spatio-temporal textual data. Our goal is to focus on representing the mutual influence and relationships that can exist between written language and the time-and-place where it was produced. We represent space, time, and text as tuples, and use pairs of elements to predict a third one. This results in three predictive tasks that are trained simultaneously. We conduct experiments on two social media datasets and on a crime dataset; we use Mean Reciprocal Rank as evaluation metric. Our experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods ranging from a 5.5% to a 24.7% improvement for location and time prediction.     

政府科技补助对企业创新投入的门槛效应——基于科技型中小企业的经验研究

本文基于我国2009年-2013年112家科技型中小企业的面板数据,以资助强度作为门槛变量,实证检验政治关联、政府科技补助对科技型中小企业创新投入的作用效果。结果表明:(1)对于我国科技型中小企业而言,政府科技补助具有显著的激励效应,没有挤出效应;(2)政治关联程度对政府科技补助与科技型中小企业创新投入之间关系具有削弱作用,但不显著;(3)随着政府科技补助强度的增大,政府科技补助的激励效应却会不断降低。     

What determines knowledge sourcing from host locations of overseas R&D operations?: A study of global R&D activities of Japanese multinationals

What determines knowledge sourcing from host locations of overseas R&D operations? We investigate factors that influence the extent to which overseas R&D laboratories source knowledge from host locations. Drawing on both the capabilities perspective and the embeddedness perspective, we have developed a conceptual model and then examined it empirically focusing on overseas R&D labs of Japanese multinationals. Statistical findings from negative binomial regressions show that both technological capabilities of the lab and external embeddedness in the local scientific and engineering communities matter.     

Discriminative sentence compression with conditional random fields

The paper focuses on a particular approach to automatic sentence compression which makes use of a discriminative sequence classifier known as Conditional Random Fields (CRF). We devise several features for CRF that allow it to incorporate information on nonlinear relations among words. Along with that, we address the issue of data paucity by collecting data from RSS feeds available on the Internet, and turning them into training data for use with CRF, drawing on techniques from biology and information retrieval. We also discuss a recursive application of CRF on the syntactic structure of a sentence as a way of improving the readability of the compression it generates. Experiments found that our approach works reasonably well compared to the state-of-the-art system [Knight, K., & Marcu, D. (2002). Summarization beyond sentence extraction: A probabilistic approach to sentence compression. Artificial Intelligence 139, 91–107.].     

Externalities of openness in innovation

Discussion of open innovation has typically stressed the benefits to the individual enterprise from boundary-spanning linkages and improved internal knowledge sharing. In this paper we explore the potential for wider benefits from openness in innovation and argue that openness may itself generate positive externalities by enabling improved knowledge diffusion. The potential for these (positive) externalities suggests a divergence between the private and social returns to openness and the potential for a sub-optimal level of openness where this is determined purely by firms’ private returns. Our analysis is based on Irish plant-level panel data from manufacturing industry over the period 1994–2008. Based on instrumental variables regression models our results suggest that externalities of openness in innovation are significant and that they are positively associated with firms’ innovation performance. We find that these externality effects are unlikely to work through their effect on the spread of open innovation practices. Instead, they appear to positively influence innovation outputs by either increasing knowledge diffusion or strengthening competition. Our evidence on the significance of externalities from openness in innovation provides a rationale for public policy aimed at promoting open innovation practices among firms.     

Detecting spam blogs from blog search results

Blogging has been an emerging media for people to express themselves. However, the presence of spam blogs (also known as splogs) may reduce the value of blogs and blog search engines. Hence, splog detection has recently attracted much attention from research. Most existing works on splog detection identify splogs using their content/link features and target on spam filters protecting blog search engines’ index from spam. In this paper, we propose a splog detection framework by monitoring the on-line search results. The novelty of our splog detection is that our detection capitalizes on the results returned by search engines. The proposed method therefore is particularly useful in detecting those splogs that have successfully slipped through the spam filters that are also actively generating spam-posts. More specifically, our method monitors the top-ranked results of a sequence of temporally-ordered queries and detects splogs based on blogs’ temporal behavior. The temporal behavior of a blog is maintained in a blog profile. Given blog profiles, splog detecting functions have been proposed and evaluated using real data collected from a popular blog search engine. Our experiments have demonstrated that splogs could be detected with high accuracy. The proposed method can be implemented on top of any existing blog search engine without intrusion to the latter.     

When does crowdsourcing benefit firm stock market performance?

Crowdsourcing is a particular form of open innovation (OI) that aims to boost idea-generation in innovation processes. The underlying rationale is that the collective intelligence of a large number of contributors outside the firm’s boundaries increases the likelihood of achieving ‘extreme outcomes’, i.e., high quality ideas with exceptional business potential. Due to the idiosyncrasies that differentiate crowdsourcing from other forms of OI, the findings from prior research on the performance implications of OI cannot be directly extended to crowdsourcing. Similarly, the findings on the effect of internal R&D on firm performance cannot be directly applied to crowdsourcing due to the greater uncertainty in dealing with a crowd of unknown individuals outside the organization whose ideas have to be evaluated and ultimately processed internally. Thus, while crowdsourcing research has recently burgeoned, it is ambiguous as to whether and when crowdsourcing is beneficial for firms. In fact, the overall effect of crowdsourcing on a firm’s future profits has not been thoroughly investigated. To fill this gap, we conducted an event study analyzing stock market reactions to crowdsourcing announcements, a forward-looking market-based measure able to isolate the effect of crowdsourcing on a firm’s future profits, which we refer to as firm stock market performance. Drawing on the resource-based view, we argue that an external crowd can become a valuable resource if the firm is able to extract value from it. Our findings show that two key contingency factors, i.e., brand value and investment opportunities, determine the boundary conditions that enable firms to extract value from the crowd, resulting in a positive stock market reaction to the announcement of a crowdsourcing campaign. In addition to advancing scholarly knowledge on crowdsourcing, our results provide practitioners with relevant indications for profitable crowdsourcing campaigns.     

R&D主体对区域经济绩效影响的门槛效应研究

采用2009-2015年中国31个省（市、区）的面板数据,从经济贡献率的视角对我国企业R&D活动的主体地位进行了再检验,并基于动态门槛面板数据模型分析了企业及政府两大R&D投入主体对区域经济的非线性差异性影响。研究认为,以R&D投入的经济绩效为评价标准,我国企业主体地位尚未真正建立;处于不同科技水平的地区,不同R&D主体的经济绩效存在差异：科技发展水平低于第一门槛时,政府R&D投入更利于促进区域经济;科技发展水平超过第一门槛时,企业才能显著促进区域经济发展;而科技水平超过第二门槛时,政府和企业对区域经济的带动效应趋于一致。我国现有研发活动中,政府和企业超过70%的R&D投入份额位于第二门槛之上,因此引导企业向中等科技发展水平地区的R&D投入,同时增大政府对科技落后地区R&D活动的扶持和补贴应成为我国科技政策的重要目标。     

Determinants of R&D investment: The Extreme-Bounds-Analysis approach applied to 26 OECD countries

This paper investigates the determinants of R&D investment at the national level with an emphasis on the roles of patent rights protection, international technology transfer through trade and FDI, and economic growth, in addition to the essentials of human capital accumulation and the number of scientific researchers. The Extreme-Bounds-Analysis (EBA) approach is applied to examine the robustness and sensitivity of these factors.The results of the EBA tests on data from 26 OECD countries from 1996 to 2006 showed that tertiary education and the proportion of scientific researchers in a country were robust determinants that had positive effects on R&D intensity. Foreign technology inflows had a robust and negative impact on domestic R&D. Patent rights protection and the income growth rate are fragile determinants of R&D investment.     

1982-2012年南四湖湿地景观格局演变分析

湿地资源具有重大的生产、生态效应。近年来,湿地丧失和退化越发严重,由此带来的生态环境问题自然成为人类关注的热点,湿地研究成为国内外学者研究的前沿领域。本研究以山东省南四湖多时序遥感与土地利用数据为基础,运用遥感和GIS技术,选取斑块密度(PD)、斑块类别面积(CA)、最大斑块指数(LPI)等景观格局指数,对南四湖1982-2012年的湿地景观格局与变化特征进行分析。研究结果表明:①1982年以来,南四湖自然湿地面积逐渐下降,由1982年的118 671.10hm2减少到2012年的69 525.63hm2;而人工湿地的面积逐年增加,2012年人工湿地达93 830.04hm2,南四湖湿地以人工湿地为主,其变化对南四湖湿地的影响较大;②对重要景观指数的计算表明:1982-2012年斑块个数(PD)逐年增加,且增长速度较快,主要是由于人口增长引起的建设用地面积不断增长;斑块平均面积(AREA-MN)在研究时期内呈逐年下降的趋势,说明南四湖湿地的破碎化程度在逐年加剧,人类活动对南四湖的影响越来越大;多样性指数(SHDI)呈波动状上升,说明研究范围内多样性逐年增大;景观均匀度(SHEI)变化不大,说明斑块类型在景观中趋于平衡。湿地景观格局的变化是自然因素和社会因素共同作用的结果,但更主要的原因为人类活动。     

Profiting from technological innovation by others: The effect of competitor patenting on firm value

In 1986, Teece proposed a seminal framework for analyzing why innovators may fail to benefit from their innovations. He argued, in part, that firms with the requisite complementary assets can often expropriate an innovator's returns especially when appropriability regimes are weak. In this paper, we explore the implications of this framework from the perspective of an incumbent firm—more precisely, of investors in that firm—facing innovation by established corporate rivals and by inventors from outside its industry. We demonstrate that the financial-market value of publicly traded firms depends on patented innovation by competitors (both established rivals and industry outsiders). Our empirical study generates three main results. First, the financial-market value of an incumbent is negatively associated with “important” patenting by outside inventors. Second, in industries characterized by weak appropriability regimes or by a strong reliance on complementary assets, this relationship is reversed: important patenting by outsiders is positively associated with the incumbent's financial-market value. Third, the effect of outsiders’ patented innovation on the focal incumbent is qualitatively different than that of established rivals’ patented innovation on the incumbent. These results are consistent with implications of Teece [Teece, D., 1986. Profiting from Innovation, Research Policy] and with recently developed models that formalize elements of his framework. More generally, these results support theories about both the market-stealing and spillover effects of innovation.     

Research groups as ‘quasi-firms’: the invention of the entrepreneurial university

Academic entrepreneurship arose from internal as well as external impetuses. The entrepreneurial university is a result of the working out of an “inner logic” of academic development that previously expanded the academic enterprise from a focus on teaching to research. The internal organization of the Research University consists of a series of research groups that have firm-like qualities, especially under conditions in which research funding is awarded on a competitive basis. Thus, the Research University shares homologous qualities with a start-up firm even before it directly engages in entrepreneurial activities.     

松杉类裸子植物的大孢子叶球理论评述

系统评述了迄今为止在裸子植物球果类种鳞形态学本质方面存在过的各种观点及研究进展。将 这些观点归纳为7大类：(1)Delpino和Penzig等主张种鳞为叶性器官的叶性说；(2)Sachs和Eichler认为种鳞相当于叶舌的叶舌说；(3)Bessey认为种鳞不过是胚珠合点端增生的结果的独特结构说；(4)Kubart等提出生胚珠构造的假种皮学说；(5)Arber的半枝学说；(6)Dupler的珠被说认为红豆杉类胚珠的肉质化部分为珠被性质的构造；(7)由Schleiden和Braun提出并由Florin等发展的枝性说则以充分的证据论证了种鳞的枝性本质。关于球果类裸子植物种鳞的性质和来源，本文作者赞同Florin枝性本质的论述；但对该构造现存式样的组成和演化过程，笔者认为该构造是在个体发育中不甚分化的专营生殖的枝性复合构造，由早期裸子植物次级生殖枝及其相关构造经过系统发育变态、融合演化形成。