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on Economics of Strategic Management |
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Issue of 2024‒07‒15
ten papers chosen by João José de Matos Ferreira, Universidade da Beira Interior |
| By: | Conlé, Marcus |
| Abstract: | In pursuit of technological development, China has created new organizations to promote innovation. In this brief, Marcus Conlé, an associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), examines New Research and Development Institutes (NRDIs), which are designed to foster knowledge transfer to industry. NRDIs were pioneered in Guangdong province in the 1990s, and have gained prominence in China’s national science, technology, and innovation policies since the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020). NRDIs are defined by their market orientation and extremely flexible organizational form. They work by establishing “innovation platforms” with local governments and private knowledge actors to carry out research and development (R&D), commercialize scientific and technological achievements, incubate local technology industries, and cultivate high-end talent. NRDIs have been instrumental to regional development in Guangdong, and especially Shenzhen, where they have succeeded in attracting talent from outside the region. NRDIs have important policy implications for international competition for talent. Understanding NRDIs is crucial for other countries that want to improve their own inter-regional innovation resources and respond to the challenge of China’s drive to attract global talent and knowledge resources. |
| Keywords: | Social and Behavioral Sciences, Guangdong, research and development, technology, innovation |
| Date: | 2024–03–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:globco:qt6rr023j0&r= |
| By: | Zhang, Min; Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés |
| Abstract: | Innovation is key for economic growth and well-being. The capacity for innovation, however, is profoundly influenced by the quality of local institutions. Although the impact of national institutions on innovation is well-documented, the effects of subnational institutional variations on innovation remain underexplored. This paper studies the impact of government agency reforms, designed to enhance local government effectiveness, on the innovation performance of city-regions in China. We examine the adoption of these reforms between 2009 and 2016 as an exogenous shock to regional institutions. Our analysis identifies a positive and significant relationship between improvements in institutional quality and the innovation performance of Chinese city-regions, particularly pronounced in regions with medium to high levels of innovation. The results are robust to a series of checks including placebo and endogeneity tests and potential confounding policies. This research highlights the critical role of government institutions in driving innovation across China, bringing the fore important regional variations in the adoption of government agency reforms that are defining the country’s innovation landscape. |
| Keywords: | institutions; government quality; institutional reform; regional innovation; China; REF fund |
| JEL: | R11 O11 |
| Date: | 2024–06–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:122728&r= |
| By: | Dobbelaere, Sabien (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); König, Michael D. (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Spescha, Andrin (ETH Zurich); Wörter, Martin (ETH Zurich) |
| Abstract: | The fraction of R&D active firms decreased in Switzerland but increased in the Netherlands from 2000-2016. This paper examines reasons for this divergence and its impact on productivity growth. Our micro-data reveal R&D concentration among high-productivity firms in Switzerland. Innovation support sustains firms' R&D activities in both countries. Our structural growth model identifies the impact of innovation, imitation and R&D costs on firms' R&D decisions. R&D costs gained importance in Switzerland but not in the Netherlands, explaining the diverging R&D trends. Yet, counterfactual analyses show that policies should prioritize enhancing innovation and imitation success over cost reduction to boost productivity growth. |
| Keywords: | R&D, innovation, imitation, R&D costs, policy, productivity growth, traveling wave |
| JEL: | E61 E65 D22 O31 O47 O52 |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17026&r= |
| By: | Xiao, Siwen; Xu, Yaosheng |
| Abstract: | China is centralizing its science and technology (S&T) sector while attempting to mitigate the costs of centralization. To this end, policymakers have designed “central-local joint action” mechanisms that balance the powers of central and local authorities. These mechanisms involve consultative processes led by the central government that aim to negotiate shared S&T investments in national priority areas with local authorities. In this policy brief, Siwen Xiao and Yaosheng Xu, research associates at IGCC, detail how these mechanisms are being implemented across three programs: the National Key Research and Development Program, the National Guidance Fund for Technology Transfer and Commercialization, and the National Centers of Technological Innovation. They also explore the challenges associated with recentralization and power balancing, which threaten to diminish China’s ambitious S&T goals to mere slogans, rather than unified and well-resourced national efforts. |
| Keywords: | Social and Behavioral Sciences, china, centralization, central power, local power, science technology and innovation |
| Date: | 2024–03–25 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cdl:globco:qt3dm955s9&r= |
| By: | Kriesch, Lukas (Justus Liebig University Giessen); Losacker, Sebastian (Justus Liebig University Giessen) |
| Abstract: | Many governments worldwide have proposed transitioning from a fossil-based economy to a bioeconomy to address climate change, resource depletion, and other environmental concerns. The bioeconomy utilizes renewable biological resources across all sectors and is strongly founded on scientific advances and technological progress. Given that the bioeconomy spans multiple sectors, industries, and technological fields, tracking it is challenging, and both policymakers and researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of the bioeconomy transition's progress. We aim to solve this problem by providing a dataset on patents, a commonly used indicator to study the development of novel knowledge and technological change, that identifies bioeconomy-related inventions. We leverage the advanced semantic understanding embedded in pre-trained transformer models to identify bioeconomy-related patents based on patent abstracts, and we use a topic modelling approach to identify several coherent technological fields within the corpus of bioeconomy patents. The dataset can be linked to other patent databases and therefore provides rich opportunities to study the technological knowledge base of the bioeconomy. |
| Keywords: | Patents; Bioeconomy; Natural Language Processing; Innovation |
| JEL: | O31 O34 Q16 Q55 |
| Date: | 2024–06–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:lucirc:2024_008&r= |
| By: | Raquel Ortega-Argilés (The University of Manchester, The Productivity Institute); Pei-Yu Yuan (The Productivity Institute) |
| Keywords: | Research collaborations, Public support for R&D and innovation, UK, levelling-up, regional development |
| JEL: | O30 O40 R50 |
| Date: | 2024–04 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anj:wpaper:046&r= |
| By: | Fossen, Frank M. (University of Nevada, Reno); McLemore, Trevor (University of Nevada, Reno); Sorgner, Alina (John Cabot University) |
| Abstract: | This survey reviews emerging but fast-growing literature on impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on entrepreneurship, providing a resource for researchers in entrepreneurship and neighboring disciplines. We begin with a review of definitions of AI and show that ambiguity and broadness of definitions adopted in empirical studies may result in obscured evidence on impacts of AI on en-trepreneurship. Against this background, we present and discuss existing theory and evidence on how AI technologies affect entrepreneurial opportunities and decision-making under uncertainty, the adoption of AI technologies by startups, entry barriers, and the performance of entrepreneurial businesses. We add an original empirical analysis of survey data from the German Socio-economic Panel revealing that entrepreneurs, particularly those with employees, are aware of and use AI technologies significantly more frequently than paid employees. Next, we discuss how AI may affect entrepreneurship indirectly through impacting local and sectoral labor markets. The reviewed evidence suggests that AI technologies that are designed to automate jobs are likely to result in a higher level of necessity entrepreneurship in a region, whereas AI technologies that transform jobs without necessarily displacing human workers increase the level of opportunity entrepreneurship. More generally, AI impacts regional entrepreneurship ecosystems (EE) in multiple ways by altering the importance of existing EE elements and processes, creating new ones, and potentially reducing the role of geography for entrepreneurship. Lastly, we address the question of how regulation of AI may affect the entrepreneurship landscape by focusing on the case of the European Union that has pioneered data protection and AI legislation. We conclude our survey by discussing implications for entrepreneurship research and policy. |
| Keywords: | artificial intelligence, machine learning, entrepreneurship, AI startups, digital entrepreneurship, opportunity, innovation, entrepreneurship ecosystem, digital entrepreneurship ecosystem, AI regulation |
| JEL: | J24 L26 O30 |
| Date: | 2024–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17055&r= |
| By: | Vivien Lefebvre (LARGE - Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg) |
| Keywords: | Potential slack zero-debt firms performance SMEs, Potential slack, zero-debt firms, performance, SMEs |
| Date: | 2023–03–16 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04585954&r= |
| By: | Robin Cowan; Nicolas Jonard; Ruth Samson |
| Abstract: | Many scholars observed changes in the intellectual property rights systems in the 1980s and 1990s throughout the world. Patent systems in particular seemed to be expanding their scope, and the legal system seemed to be changing its attitudes towards intellectual property rights. At the same time, and probably in response, firms started to change their patenting behaviour — treating patents as tools of competition and bargaining rather than as a means to protect the fruits of intellectual labour. In this paper we present a simulation model that can be used to discuss that shift. Firms search for new technologies and patent what they find. But different firms have different strategies: one is to protect an invention; a second is to protect a technology space; the third is to attack others’ technology spaces. In the literature the latter two have been described as different types of blocking. We examine different IPR regimes, characterized by who is able to infringe whose patent rights. This is an extreme case of who is able to extract rents from a given configuration of patent rights. |
| Keywords: | Innovation, Patents, Knowledge network, Blocking strategies. |
| JEL: | O31 O34 C6 L5 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2024-20&r= |
| By: | Jose M Gonzalez-Varona; Adolfo Lopez-Paredes; David Poza; Fernando Acebes |
| Abstract: | Purpose: The new competitive environment characterized by innovation and constant change is forcing a new organizational behavior. This requires a digital transformation of SMEs based on collective performance determinants. SMEs have particular characteristics that differentiate them from large companies and a model that allows them to identify, leverage and develop their digital capabilities can help them to advance in digital maturity. Design/methodology/approach: An in-depth review of the existing literature on digital transformation and organizational competence was carried out on Scopus and Web of Science to identify the digital challenges faced by SMEs, and what digital capabilities they have to develop to face these challenges. In order to obtain the necessary information for the refinement of organizational competence for digital transformation model, six experts were interviewed; three of them are academics and the other three are professionals with management responsibilities in SMEs. We used semi-structured interviews, to keep the interviews focused and facilitate cross-data analysis between experts. In addition, it allowed us the possibility of analyzing new relevant aspects that could arise during the interview. Findings: As a result of this study we have developed a refined model of organizational competence for digital transformation that allows SMEs to identify and develop the digital capabilities necessary to advance in the digital transformation, refined with the opinions of six experts consulted. We were able to observe the importance of organizational learning and organizational knowledge to advance the digital transformation of SMEs. |
| Date: | 2024–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2406.01615&r= |