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on Economics of Strategic Management |
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Issue of 2021‒06‒14
five papers chosen by João José de Matos Ferreira Universidade da Beira Interior |
| By: | INUI Tomohiko; IKEDA Yuya; KAKINO Shingo |
| Abstract: | This paper surveys the existing studies on the effects of the accumulation of human capital through higher education on the productivity of workers, and examines the effects of the presence of PhD holders in the firm on its innovation activities. According to past studies measuring the wage premium for postgraduate personnel in Japan, the wage premium for postgraduate graduates is about 20 ~ 30%. On the other hand, according to existing studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, the wage premium for postgraduates is estimated to be about 10 ~ 30%. The difference in the estimated wage premiums between US, UK, and Japan are not large. These past studies suggest the possibility that graduate school education in Japan contributes to worker productivity improvement with the accumulation of human capital to some extent. It is expected that doctoral degree holders in a firm have significant learning capacity and have the effect of enhancing the performance of innovation activities of the firm. The effect of doctoral degree holders on the innovation activity of firms is analyzed by taking into account firm management practice. Our results indicate that firms with PhD holders are more likely to succeed in both product and process innovations in comparison to firms without PhD holders. The magnitudes of these effects are 4.5 percentage points and 3.8 percentage points higher, respectively. It is also shown that the management practice of providing favorable treatment to researchers has a positive effect in realizing innovation in the firm. |
| Date: | 2021–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:eti:rpdpjp:21009&r= |
| By: | BENASSI Mario; GRINZA Elena; RENTOCCHINI Francesco (European Commission - JRC); RONDI Laura |
| Abstract: | We investigate whether firm performance is related to the accumulated stock of technological knowledge associated with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and, if so, whether the firm’s history in 4IR technology development affects such a relationship. We exploit a rich longitudinal matched patent-firm data set on the population of large firms that filed 4IR patents at the European Patent Office (EPO) between 2009 and 2014, while reconstructing their patent stocks from 1985 onwards. To identify 4IR patents, we use a novel two-step procedure proposed by EPO (2020), based on Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) codes and on a full-text patent search. Our results show a positive and significant relationship between firms’ stocks of 4IR patents and labour and total factor productivity. We also find that firms with a long history in 4IR patent filings benefit more from the development of 4IR technological capabilities than later applicants. Conversely, we find that firm profitability is not significantly related to the stock of 4IR patents, which suggests that the returns from 4IR technological developments may be slow to be cashed in. Finally, we find that the positive relationship with productivity is stronger for 4IR-related wireless technology and for AI, cognitive computing and big data analytics. |
| Keywords: | Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR); patent applications; technology development; firm performance; longitudinal matched patent-firm data; Industry 4.0 |
| Date: | 2021–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ipt:wpaper:202101&r= |
| By: | Michel Dumont |
| Abstract: | This paper considers the evolution in business dynamism and its potential link with productivity growth in Belgium. Statistics on business creation, the exit of enterprises and within-industry reallocation are presented. Data on Belgian firms, covering the period 2003-2017, are used for a decomposition of productivity growth. The paper provides robust indications of the substantial contribution of productivity growth of startups in the early years after entry. |
| Keywords: | Start-ups, Young firms, Reallocation, Efficiency, Productivity growth |
| JEL: | D22 D24 L25 L26 M13 |
| Date: | 2021–05–28 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpb:wpaper:2105&r= |
| By: | Klingler-Vidra, Robyn; Tran, Ba Linh; Chalmers, Adam William |
| Abstract: | Do high-performing entrepreneurs in the technology sector in emerging economies have more, or different, transnational experience than the founders of high-performing non-technology businesses? Employing Vietnam as a case study, we find that they do; the founders of high-performing technology-oriented businesses are 15 times more likely to have transnational experience in the U.S. compared to their non-technology peers, and are 35 times more likely to be graduates of American universities compared to founders of high-performing, non-technology-oriented business. The founders of high-performing non-technology businesses are more ‘place-based’, as they have predominantly lived and studied in Vietnam. Our data and methods are comprised of a logistic regression analysis of the biographical details of Vietnam's 143 highest-performing entrepreneurs; the founders of the 76 Vietnam's (non-technology-based) companies with the highest market capitalizations and the 67 founders of Vietnam's highest performing technology-oriented companies, in terms of private equity fundraising, as of April 2020. The paper's theoretical contribution is the advance it makes in analytical explanations of why technology-based entrepreneurs have more transnational experience, especially in the U.S., than high-performing founders of businesses in other sectors; this helps extend theory on the relationship between social and human capital and entrepreneurial performance, specifically in the technology sector. |
| Keywords: | entrepreneurship; innovation; returnees; social capital; transnational experience; Vietnam; Impact Acceleration Account research grant |
| JEL: | R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2021–08–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:110756&r= |
| By: | Plechero, Monica (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice); Grillitsch, Markus (CIRCLE, Lund University) |
| Abstract: | Industry 4.0 requires from manufacturing firms to become more innovative in order to remain relevant and competitive. To step-up firm innovation, several studies in Innovation and Economic Geography foreground that firms need to combine knowledge in novel ways either within local industrial structures or over distance. The contribution of this paper is to investigate in-depth how manufacturing firms with traditional roots combine new generative knowledge in and beyond a local production system (LPS), what enables them to access and integrate such knowledge from external sources, and how this relates to the firms’ innovation performance, with a focus on radical and varied forms of innovation. The contribution of this paper lies also in a mixed-methods research approach, which combines a population-based survey of mechatronics firms in an Italian LPS, with in-depth interviews. This allows for a qualitative interpretation of the causes of the identified distributions and correlations. The main finding of the paper is that firms generating radical innovations and varied forms of innovation combine unrelated types of knowledge in-house and through external sources. The pattern is that the traditional manufacturing knowledge of mechatronics firms still prevails but that firms increasingly complement this with new knowledge, in particular science-based analytical knowledge. Firms that have acquired complementary knowledge in-house are able to access new knowledge nationally or internationally. Even though firms source knowledge relatively frequently within the local production system, the firms who access new knowledge nationally and internationally stand out in terms of their innovation performance. |
| Keywords: | Industry 4.0; knowledge bases; local productive system; innovation; manufacturing firms |
| JEL: | O33 R11 |
| Date: | 2021–06–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2021_005&r= |