Product innovation and the decision to invest in fixed capital assets: Evidence from an SME survey in six European Union member states

This work explores the relationship between product innovation and the decision to invest in fixed capital assets among a sample of SMEs in six European Union countries located in both peripheral and more central areas. We find that the presence of product innovation reduces the probability to invest. A firm’s size exerts a direct, inverted U-shape effect on the probability to invest and an indirect effect through the linear effect of size on the probability to innovate. The gap in the probability to invest between innovative and non-innovative firms increases with size.     

The governance and performance of Xerox’s technology spin-off companies

Companies that conduct internal research cannot fully specify the output from that research in advance. Inevitably, spillovers may result. A company might choose to create a technology spin-off company to realize value from such research spillovers. But how is such a spin-off to be governed? Effective spin-off governance structures in a highly uncertain environment must promote experimentation and adaptation, in order to unlock the latent value in a technology. These can conflict with structures intended to manage coordination with the parent firm’s complementary assets.This paper analyses 35 spin-off organizations that arose from the Xerox Corporation. Xerox’s own initial equity position is negatively correlated with the subsequent performance of its spin-offs, but this is due not to their equity per se, but Xerox’s practices in managing its spin-offs. Spin-offs with a higher percentage of venture capital investors on their Boards were associated with higher financial performance, while spin-offs with a Xerox insider as CEO were associated with lower financial performance. Qualitative interview data suggest that Xerox’s practices caused its spin-offs to search locally near Xerox’s own business, while spin-offs governed by outside investors’ practices searched a broader space for commercializing their technologies.     

Innovation and firm growth in high-tech sectors: A quantile regression approach

We relate innovation to sales growth for incumbent firms in high-tech sectors. A firm, on average, experiences only modest growth and may grow for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to innovative activity. However, given that the returns to innovation are highly skewed and that growth rates distributions are heavy-tailed, it may be misleading to use regression techniques that focus on the ‘average effect for the average firm’. Using a quantile regression approach, we observe that innovation is of crucial importance for a handful of ‘superstar’ fast-growth firms.     

When publications lead to products: The open science conundrum in new product development

This paper examines interdependencies between firms’ activities in the realms of open science and commercial product development. We present a theoretical framework that outlines when a firm’s involvement in academic communities enhances its innovative performance in terms of new products in development. We argue that the disclosure of more, valuable R&D work in quality scholarly publications and collaborations with academic partners positively affect firm innovation. We further hypothesize a differential effect of adopting open science strategies on the innovation type, being more pronounced for radical innovations than for incremental innovations. We empirically analyze a unique panel dataset containing information on the product innovation performance and R&D activities of 160 UK therapeutic biotechnology firms over the period 1998- 2009. Our results from count data models on the number of new products in development provide empirical support for our hypotheses.     

Developmental financial institutions as technology policy instruments: implications for innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging economies

Developmental financial institutions (DFIs) in emerging economies regularly assess new technology platforms to support their investments in new ventures, established firms, and technology institutions (TIs). Their financing decisions are guided by national priorities such as achieving technological self-reliance. By providing attractive financing options and related support, DFIs are well placed to consciously channel finance into designated priority technology areas. To better understand DFI roles, we conducted multiple interviews with participants affiliated with DFIs, firms and TIs in India. From data gathered from these interviews and secondary data on DFIs in emerging economies, we develop a preliminary framework to suggest that DFIs, when proactive in making technology assessments, form an important link between developing a firm’s absorptive capacity and building a nation’s innovative capacity. Also, DFI financing facilitates new venture creation in the context of underdeveloped capital markets prevalent in emerging economies. To illustrate these roles, we consider technology support programs of DFIs in India and their role in the information technology (IT) industry.     

Overseas R&D, knowledge sourcing, and patenting: an empirical study of Japanese R&D investment in the US

This paper purports to study the contribution of R&D at home and abroad to the firm’s inventive activity, using a sample of 137 Japanese multinationals. The empirical analysis relates the number of inventions in Japan and that in the US, as measured by the number of patents issued by the USPTO, to the parent’s R&D, the US subsidiaries’ R&D, the presence of R&D in Europe, the firm’s experience in the US, entry mode, and industry dummies. In addition, to study the subsidiary’s role in sourcing local technological knowledge, we construct indices of local technological strength of the state in which the subsidiary is located. The results, most importantly, indicate that these indices positively contribute to inventions at home and in the US among Type R firms, whose R&D subsidiaries mainly aim to research, suggesting that knowledge sourcing is an important function of these subsidiaries and locational choice is important for this purpose. These results do not hold among Type S firms, whose R&D subsidiaries mainly aim to support local manufacturing and sales activities.     

An audit of technological innovation capabilities in chinese firms: some empirical findings in Beijing, China

Recent studies have advocated different technological innovation capabilities (TICs) and discussed their impact on a firm’s competitive performance. This paper introduces a study framework of innovation audit and examines the relevance of seven TICs to building and sustaining the competitiveness of Chinese firms. Empirical data was acquired through a recent study of 213 Chinese firms in Beijing, China. Regression analysis was employed to examine the correlation between TICs and innovation rate, sales growth, and product competitiveness among these firms. The findings verify that R&D and resources allocation capabilities are the two most important TICs. A strong R&D capability could safeguard innovation rate and product competitiveness in large and medium-sized firms, whereas a resources allocation capability would enhance the sales growth in small firms. However, the impact of learning and organising capabilities on a firm’s innovation performance has yet to be investigated.The findings of this paper suggest that Chinese firms should consider a more balanced focus on their TICs’ harmonising enhancement. In order to maintain their sustainable development, effectively plan and implement their innovation strategies as well as enhance their whole innovation capability, Chinese firms should closely relate their TICs to the formulation of technology strategy and harmonisation of innovation and R&D activities.     

Network embeddedness and the exploration of novel technologies: Technological distance, betweenness centrality and density

This paper aims to understand better the innovation potential of a firm’s alliance network. Here we analyze the role of an alliance network in terms of the technological distance between partners, a firm’s network position (centrality) and total network density. We study how these three elements of an alliance network, separately and in combination, affect the ‘twin tasks’ in exploration, namely novelty creation on the one hand and its efficient absorption on the other hand. For an empirical test, we study technology-based alliance networks in the pharmaceutical, chemical and automotive industries. Our findings indicate that successful exploration indeed seems to require a delicate balance between these two exploration tasks. A second conclusion is that different network positions yield different pay-offs in terms of the number of explorative patents. In other words, success rates for exploration are not spread equally across firms. However, position alone does not tell the full story. Our empirical findings clearly indicate that exploration success also depends on the other two dimensions of embeddedness, namely technological distance and network density. The three elements of network embeddedness need to be considered jointly in order to understand their complementary effects on both novelty creation and absorptive capacity.     

Toward a conceptual framework of the process of organized innovation technological within the firm

The literature concerning information flow and organizational design for technological innovation is summarized and a conceptual framework of the process of organized technological innovation within the firm is developed. The framework incorporates Rosenbloom's premise that corporate strategy can serve to cut across both internal and external boundaries of the firm and is shown to be consistent with the relevant organizational and planning literatures. The potential for using mathematical models to represent a firm's corporate strategy, budgeting and resource allocation activities is discussed. We argue that such models are needed to provide for policy analysis and could lead to a simulation capability that serves as a surrogate for real-life experimentation.     

中国农业创新发展模式研究综述

中国经济正在以前所未有的姿态与世界接轨。农业作为中国经济的重要部门,也正经历着重要的历史性转变。近年来,农业创新与发展出现的一些新模式将对中国经济产生重大的影响,有必要对中国农业创新发展模式给予高度的关注。当前学术界对中国农业创新发展模式的研究主要散落于系统、制度、框架、科技、社会和组织等局部性的探讨,而整体性、结构性的研究十分欠缺。学理上,农业创新发展模式可以被看作创新发展的理论图式和解释方案,具有典型的整体性和结构性特征,值得全面总结与梳理。本文依据结构主义对农业创新发展模式进行整体性的分析,认为中国农业创新发展模式主要可以分为两类：一是农业内部创新生成模式;二是产业融合创新发展模式。在新时期,产业融合创新发展模式将成为主流和未来的发展趋向,在演化过程中受外部因素和控制变量影响,逐渐生成中国特有的创新发展模式。     

产学研融合视域下创新型人才的培养模式与优化路径研究——基于双案例的对比研究

培养产学研深度融合的创新型人才是我国建设世界科技强国的迫切需求,也是当前各行业创新型人才智力支撑不足的现实需要。本研究对协同理论进行修正和优化,引入人才培养的要素单元,建立了“要素识别、模式建立、组织机制、协同路径”动态分析曲线,从协同效应和互补效应视角对人才培养的内在机理进行解释。然后,采用案例分析法,对创新型人才培养的“三创型”人才培养模式和“OBE”人才培养模式进行分析,提出知识异质化条件下创新型人才培养的组织特点和内在规律,提出了产学研融合过程中创新型人才知识学习过程模型。本研究结论对于揭示创新型人才培养的内在规律及实施路径具有较好的理论和实践价值。     

Knowledge integration in the shadow of tacit spillovers: Empirical evidence from U.S. R&D labs

Integrating knowledge across a firm's value chain (e.g. between R&D, marketing and manufacturing functions), which we denote “Knowledge Integration” (KI), has been consistently found to be a strong predictor of product innovation performance in the management literature. Such cross-functional integration does not occur by chance, but by design, as a result of managerial practices and organizational arrangements. The significant heterogeneity characterizing the diffusion of cross-functional integration across firms is suggestive of the well-known tension between internal and external diffusion of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the hidden cost of KI is to expose firms to a higher risk of knowledge leakages and provide the first systematic empirical evidence of this apparent tension between internal and external knowledge flows. Based on data from the CMU Survey (one of the rare datasets offering observables on both sides of the tension for a representative set of R&D active firms in the US), we investigate the impact of knowledge spillovers to competitors on internal cross-functional knowledge integration involving the R&D function among manufacturing firms. We find that the intensity of (tacit) R&D knowledge spillovers at the industry-level has a negative and significant impact on the likelihood that firms adopt or achieve KI. Our results therefore suggest that firms may trade their optimal innovative performance against superior appropriability of their rents.     

Approaching the innovation frontier in Korea: the transition phase to leadership

As leading East Asian latecomer firms begin to compete on the basis of new product development and in-house research and development (R&D), they appear to confront a difficult strategic dilemma. Should they compete as R&D and brand leaders on the international stage or should they continue with their tried and tested formula of low cost catch up competitiveness? Most studies of East Asian firms focus on catch up innovation processes. By contrast, this paper focuses on the challenges facing latecomer firms in the transition phase from catch up to leadership status, in order to assess the ‘strategic dilemma’ argument and examine the nature of transition innovation. Based on in-depth interviews with leading Korean firms, the paper contends that the strategic dilemma argument is a misleading oversimplification of the main innovation challenges facing most Korean firms as they become more technologically advanced. Most of the major exporters (or chaebol) offer a portfolio of products, some of which are technologically advanced and others less advanced. Corporate innovation strategies tend to be executed in relation to the needs of specific products (or closely related product families) rather than ‘the firm’ in its entirety. In addition, many firms in many product areas have yet to reach the innovation frontier stage and even the leading chaebol continue to produce large volumes of products under sub-contracting and licensing agreements. Firm strategies tend to embody a mix of leadership, ‘followership’ and latecomer positions according to the product portfolio of the company in question. The study identifies various strategic options and difficulties facing Korean firms during the transition process and points to promising future research on latecomer transition.     

The temporal trajectories of innovative search: Insights from public hospital services

This article explores the temporal trajectories of innovative search. Drawing on conceptual ideas from the behavioural theory of the firm, it proposes that the level of temporal persistence in organisations’ innovative search activities is affected by four key factors. These include (i) the mode of innovative search as well as organisations’ (ii) strategic aspirations, (iii) slack resources and (iv) performance feedback. This conceptual model is tested in the context of public hospital services in England. Results from dynamic panel data analyses reveal stronger temporal persistence in science- than in practice-based innovative search activities. Findings also suggest that specialist hospitals relying on a continuous stream of new products, services and processes to meet their strategic aspirations are better positioned to sustain science-based innovative search activities than their generalist counterparts. Similarly, results uncover a positive association between the availability of financial slack and hospitals’ ability to continuously engage in superior levels of science-based innovative search. Contrary to theoretical expectations, however, positive performance feedback does not appear to have any persistence-enhancing effect.     

Rethinking the market-technology relationship for innovation

This paper revisits the ‘what causes innovation — market pull or technology push?’ debate to argue that the conceptualisation is flawed and that the firm is the only ‘agent’ capable of innovative action. The paper differentiates between ‘use’, ‘need’ and ‘intended use’ to obtain greater precision with respect to the technology-market matching process that is fundamental to innovation. The validity of the approach is demonstrated through empirical examples. These examples also show the value of distinguishing between two types of market concept used by the innovating firm. These are the ‘reference market’ which is a traded product that is a principal source of ‘use’ ideas for the mental construction of the ‘innovation market’ concept. It is the latter that can be thought to guide the construction of innovative production technology.     

国际视野下的创新政策过程研究

随着中国的崛起,其创新政策越来越受到国际力量的关注,并不可避免地受到国际力量的干预和影响。因此,从国际视野审视创新政策及过程对中国科学地制定创新政策具有重要意义。已有研究主要关注全球化影响下创新政策目标、内容和工具的变化,并把创新政策看作一个主权国家的内部政治活动,从政策过程讨论全球化和国际因素对创新政策的影响还不多见。本文从国际视野出发构建了基于“过程—主体—影响力”的创新政策过程三维分析框架,并对“中国自主创新产品政府采购”政策和“中国制造2025”政策的政策过程进行了比较分析。研究认为,中国的创新政策与贸易乃至对外事务的界限模糊化使得创新政策过程成为国际—国内双重博弈的复杂过程,创新政策制定的各个阶段都受到国际因素的影响,各类利益相关者基于形势变化和利益需求在不同政策中发挥的作用有明显区别,政策出台国和政策干预国的相互依赖程度和国际影响力最终决定了一国创新政策的受干预程度。     

Social behavior and brand devotion among iPhone innovators

Convergence of communication technologies and innovative product features are expanding the markets for technological products and services. Prior literature on technology acceptance and use has focused on utilitarian belief factors as predictors of rational adoption decisions and subsequent user behavior. This presupposes that consumers’ intentions to use technology are based on functional or utilitarian needs. Using netnographic evidence on iPhone usage, this study suggests that innovative consumers adopt and use new technology for not just utilitarian but also for experiential outcomes. The study presents an interpretive analysis of the consumption behavior of very early iPhone users. Apple introduced iPhone as a revolutionary mobile handset offering integrated features and converged services—a handheld computer-cum-phone with a touch-screen web browser, a music player, an organizer, a note-taker, and a camera. This revolutionary product opened up new possibilities to meld functional tasks, hedonism, and social signaling. The study suggests that even utilitarian users have hedonic and social factors present in their consumption patterns.     

Beyond the search process – Exploring group members’ information behavior in context

This paper reports on the findings from a longitudinal case study exploring Kuhlthau’s information search process (ISP)-model in a group based academic setting. The research focus is on group members’ activities and cognitive and emotional experiences during the task process of writing an assignment. It is investigated if group members’ information behavior differ from the individual information seeker in the ISP-model and to what extent this behavior is influenced by contextual (work task) and social (group work) factors. Three groups of LIS students were followed during a 14 weeks period in 2004/2005 (10 participants). Quantitative and qualitative methods were employed, such as demographic surveys, process surveys, diaries and interviews. Similarities in behavior were found between group members and the individual in Kuhlthau’s ISP-model with regard to the general stages of information seeking, the cognitive pattern associated with focus formulation and the tendency towards an increase in writing activities while searching activities decreased. Differences in behavior were also found, which were associated with contextual and social factors beyond the mere search process. It is concluded that the ISP-model does not fully comply with group members’ problem solving process and the involved information seeking behavior. Further, complex academic problem solving seems to be even more complex when it is performed in a group based setting. The study contributes with a new conceptual understanding of students’ behavior in small groups.     

基于系统动力学的企业创新观点

从创新角度出发,运用了系统动力学的思想和观点,提出了企业创新系统是受到内、外部因素相互关联和共同影响的,是内部因素起主导作用而且是动态平衡的、开放的和反馈的复杂系统。