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on Economics of Strategic Management |
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Issue of 2015‒01‒09
seven papers chosen by João José de Matos Ferreira Universidade da Beira Interior |
| By: | Claire Nauwelaers (Independent Policy Analyst); Alexander Kleibrink (European Commission – JRC - IPTS); Katerina Stancova (European Commission – JRC - IPTS) |
| Abstract: | Science and technology parks (STPs) are very common instruments used by regional and national authorities for regional development. Their main objective is to foster science-based growth poles to stimulate economic diversification away from declining industries. Today, STPs are present in many European regions. They concentrate a wide range of innovative companies and research organisations, and as a consequence the overall knowledge intensity of these places is very high. STPs are thus likely to include seeds for the domains of knowledge-intensive specialisation, on which regions can rely to increase their competitiveness. This is why STPs seem well placed to play a key role in innovation strategies for smart specialisation (S3). We argue that the diversity of STP models by definition means that their contribution to smart specialisation is very likely to depend on the specific context. Three key roles for STPs in the design and implementation of smart specialisation strategies are proposed: (1) STPs may provide an adequate innovation ecosystem for the development of pilot innovation initiatives, well in line with the entrepreneurial discovery process that should drive the regional economies towards new, distinctive and competitive areas of activities. (2) STPs can play an important role as one of the relevant stakeholders forming the quadruple helix of innovation actors shaping smart specialisation strategies. (3) STPs can add the needed external and outward-looking dimension to smart specialisation strategies, a dimension that is today still very much under-developed. Yet, these contributions from STPs cannot be taken for granted. We identify limitations and success conditions for each of the three roles. Illustrative examples of STPs in Finland, England and the Netherlands show how STPs can actively and creatively contribute to the design of innovation strategies and to the external connectivity of their home regions. |
| Keywords: | European cohesion policy, Structural Funds, smart specialisation, Innovation Union, science and technology parks, innovation ecosystem, regional development |
| Date: | 2014–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:iptwpa:jrc90719&r=cse |
| By: | Ainurul Rosli (University of Wolverhampton Business School); Federica Rossi (Birkbeck, University of London) |
| Date: | 2014–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:img:wpaper:20&r=cse |
| By: | Veronika Poreisz; Szabolcs Rámháp |
| Abstract: | Global cities' competitiveness factors among the Asian countries This article identifies the factors of global cities' competitiveness, focusing on Asian countries. First, it describes the importance of global cities in the economy, particularly those competiveness factors, which are originated from spatial concentration, which can be implemented in the development strategy, or considering the negative externalities, which should be avoided or at least handle them to reach sustainability. In the next phase we describe the various methodologies applied for measuring competitiveness. The third part of the study covers the detailed description of the Asian global cities' competitive characteristics. We focus on the globalization, the economics growth and competitiveness; we also mention key factors, like tourism. Considering history cities have always played a determining role in the economy of a country, so do they in nowadays society. The world population in cities keeps on growing, the metropolis areas have become the centers of innovation and development, that is why their analysis is appropriate. Regional economics has been dealing with the question of cities for a long time, which has become an emphasized research field. The focus is on the spatial concentration, their integrated economy, the capital and the information. In our century a determining part of the population is townsman, where the service sector is dominant. The concentration of consumer - and labor market can be experienced in megacities: the local extern effects generate economic advantages, while the transportation costs shrink. The competition between cities has become fierce: the biggest cities try to attract transnational companies and FDI. A complex analysis of the cities' competitiveness contributes to the establishment of economic, social and environmental sustainability. As there is a pattern of global cities the network of cities has divided into two parts: the global cities spatial relations are integrated into the world economy and loose contact with the local and traditional smaller cities in their region. The smaller cities tend to be smaller, they are out of the economic circulation, and they are endangered by depletion. This road leads to social and economic inequality, the differences between the cities in and out of the global network grows dramatically. The goal of our study is to describe the various methodologies applied for measuring competitiveness, and to bring awareness to the challenges of the near-future caused by the developing, emerging Asian cities. Key words: competitveness, Asian global cities, urban externalities JEL codes: R11, Q19, Q56 |
| Keywords: | competitveness; Asian global cities; urban externalities; |
| JEL: | R11 Q19 Q56 |
| Date: | 2014–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p231&r=cse |
| By: | Denis Ivanov |
| Abstract: | This paper searches for roots of current spatial pattern of professional services in location of Soviet-era R&D sector. The Soviet economy sponsored massive R&D oriented mainly on military purposes. Research was carried out in large institutions affiliated with academia or industry. After the collapse of socialism, military spending and related R&D decreased dramatically. Many researchers left Soviet-style institutions and succeed in the market economy. Did however this process mean anything for geography? Under the centrally planned economy, locational decisions were driven by non-market motives. Moreover, it was near-impossible for planners to anticipate which regions would be more promising under market. I focus on professional services since these industries do not rely on physical capital endowments, so sunk costs are unlikely to impose path-dependence. Professional services in Russia typically hire young educated persons which are expected to be mobile, so imperfect labor market is also unlikely to stick people to places ? unlike human capital externalities which are plausibly to do so. I regress employment in professional services in 2009-2011 by 76 Russian regions on the number of R&D staff in 1991. I consider three industries: architecture and engineering; information technology; accounting, auditing and management consulting. Controls to capture industry location fundamentals include modern-day gross regional product or overall employment, number of employees with university degree, number of R&D staff and urbanization. It should be noted that present-day number of R&D staff comprises primarily employees of state-owned Soviet-style institutions while professional service providers are typically up-to-date privately-owned firms. Results reveal that employment in Soviet R&D positively and significantly affects present-day employment in engineering and in IT. No such evidence is found for accounting, auditing and management consulting in which industries researchers' skills were less relevant. Results remains when shares in employment of professional services and R&D sector are plugged into regression instead of absolute numbers. I consider different explanations for this phenomenon. I attempt to track influence of 1991 R&D-related employment on current output-per-worker in IT and engineering and find positive correlation, although marginally significant. So, it is unlikely that Soviet-era pools of human capital created regional poverty traps due to low migration rates, and human capital externalities theory seems plausible. I also find that regions with greater number of R&D staff in 1991 now have greater number of SMEs both in business services and in the rest of economy, so entrepreneurship is a likely mechanism to impose path-dependence. |
| JEL: | N74 R12 |
| Date: | 2014–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p767&r=cse |
| By: | Roberto Ganau; Eleonora Di Maria |
| Abstract: | The study of the determinants of innovation processes has received great attention in both the economics and the business literature. However, only few contributions have proposed a comprehensive framework able to bring together different but not mutually exclusive research approaches. This paper contributes to the analysis of the determinants of technological innovation - namely, product and process innovations - focusing on Italian manufacturing small and medium sized firms (SMEs) by accounting, simultaneously, for firm-specific characteristics, agglomeration economies and the role of KIBS providers. Specifically, the paper provides an empirical investigation which is built on a multi-dimensional theoretical basis which gathers the resource-based view of the firm and the new economic geography framework together. The empirical exercise employs data of about 4,000 Italian SMEs observed over the period 2004-2006 and drawn from the Unicredit-Capitalia database. Parametric probabilistic models are estimated in order to identify the joint effects of several potential determinants of successful technological innovation. Overall, results suggest that technological innovation in manufacturing SMEs is mainly driven by firm-specific characteristics. It emerges that experience and knowledge accumulated over time (i.e. age) as well as availability of human and capital resources (i.e. size) matter for being innovative firms. Moreover, innovative firms show both higher labour productivity levels and higher investments in R&D activities than non-innovative firms. Results partially support previous findings on the agglomeration-innovation relationship: overall, diversification (specialisation) externalities seem to positively (negatively) affect (high-tech) firms' probability of introducing technological innovations. Finally, results suggest that the spatial agglomeration of KIBS providers - i.e. being located in an area characterised by a high concentration of KIBS firms - does not matter per se: in fact, a positive effect emerges only when firms' heterogeneity in absorptive capacity is explicitly considered. Results show that only (low-tech) SMEs which invest in R&D activities benefit from a high geographic concentration of (professional and technological) KIBS firms. |
| Keywords: | Technological innovation; Manufacturing SMEs; Resource-Based Theory; Agglomeration Economies; KIBS providers; Italy; |
| JEL: | D22 O31 R12 |
| Date: | 2014–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wiw:wiwrsa:ersa14p820&r=cse |
| By: | Hottenrott, Hanna; Lopes-Bento, Cindy |
| Abstract: | R&D collaboration facilitates pooling of complementary skills, learning from the partner as well as sharing risks and costs. Research therefore repeatedly stressed the positive relationship between collaborative R&D and innovation performance. Fewer studies addressed potential drawbacks of collaborative R&D. Collaborative R&D comes at the costs of coordination and monitoring, requires knowledge disclosure and involves the risk of opportunistic behaviour by the partners. Thus, while the net gains from collaboration can be high initially, cost may start to outweigh those benefits if firms engage in multiple collaborative projects simultaneously. This study explicitly considers a firm's collaboration intensity, that is, the share of collaborative R&D projects in the firms' total R&D project portfolio. For a sample of 2,891 firms located in Germany, active in abroad range of manufacturing and service sectors and of which 86% are SMEs, we indeed find that increasing the share of collaborative R&D projects in total R&D projects is associated with a higher probability of product innovation and with a higher market success of new products. While we can confirm previous findings in terms of gains for innovation performance, we also find that collaboration has decreasing and even negative returns on product innovation if its intensity increases above a certain threshold. Consequently, the relationship between collaboration intensity and innovation has an inverted-U shape. In particular, costs start outweighing benefits if a firm pursues more than about two thirds of its R&D projects in collaboration. This result is robust to conditioning market success to the introduction of new products and to accounting for the selection into collaborating. |
| Keywords: | innovation performance,product innovation,R&D partnerships,collaboration intensity,SMEs,transaction costs,selection model,endogenous switching |
| JEL: | O31 O32 O33 O34 |
| Date: | 2014 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:14108&r=cse |
| By: | Lucarelli, Stefano; Baron, Hervé |
| Abstract: | The present paper, taking the cue from the Italian translation of Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Sozialwissenschaften (The Past and Future of Social Sciences), a Schumpeter’s book which was not always well understood in the literature, tries to pose some questions about Schumpeter’s work. Firstly: is it possible, starting from that book, to reconstruct a Schumpeterian theory of scientific development? Subsequently: is Vergangenheit und Zukunft only «a brief outline of what first became the Epochen [der Dogmen– und Methodengeschichte] and finally the History of Economic Analysis», as Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter wrote in the Editor’s Introduction (July 1952) to the History of Economic Analysis (p. XXXII), or should it be read as a complement of Epochen and, possibly, History? Lastly: is it correct to say that Schumpeter’s work had the ambitious objective of developing a ‘comprehensive sociology’ as the eminent Japanese scholar Shionoya did? |
| Keywords: | Schumpeter, social sciences, method, scientific development. |
| JEL: | A12 B25 B31 B41 |
| Date: | 2014–04–30 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:60391&r=cse |