Innovation Catch-up Research Articles

Impact of the latecomer's ambidextrous innovation catch-up on the performance of technical standards alliance from the perspective of alliance routines

Joining a technical standards alliance is becoming increasingly crucial for latecomer enterprises’ innovation catch-up in today's fast-paced technological environment. This study investigates the influence of latecomers’ ambidextrous innovation on technical standards alliances while highlighting the importance of alliance routines. A structural equation model is used to analyse a sample of 118 latecomer members and 45 technical standards alliances in China's strategic emerging industries. Several novel findings are reported. First, latecomers’ two types of innovation catch-up and the three dimensions of alliance routines promote alliance performance, all of which positively impact alliance performance. Second, alliance routines have different effects on latecomers’ Ambidextrous innovation catch-up. All three dimensions of the alliance routine promote utilisation innovation catch-up, whereas behavioural logic and interactive consensus hinder exploration innovation catch-up. Third, utilisation innovation completely mediates between alliance practice and performance, whereas exploration innovation only plays a partial mediating role. This study presents specific recommendations for latecomer enterprises and technical standards alliances.

Going Aboard or Bringing In? The Knowledge-based View on Innovation Catch-up in Emerging Markets

Going Aboard or Bringing In? The Knowledge-based View on Innovation Catch-up in Emerging Markets

Technological Catch-Up, Innovation, and Productivity Analysis of National Innovation Systems in Developing Countries in Africa 2010–2018

This study investigates the levels and determinants of regional innovation catch-up, frontier shift, and productivity growth of African national innovation systems from 2010 to 2018. The study relied on the World Development Indicators data for 28 African countries. Non-radial non-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and bootstrapped truncated regression were the central estimation methodologies. The results revealed that 18% of Africa’s national innovation systems had experienced progress in the catch-up and frontier shift indexes. Further results showed that 21% had experienced total factor productivity growth. Nigeria and South Africa were on the region’s efficient frontier and had achieved the most technological advancement. In addition, Ghana and Senegal had the most productive national innovation systems. The results suggested that national innovation systems in Africa had experienced marginal progress. Further results indicate that the population growth rate and GDP per capita are the critical determinants of African national innovation systems, efficiency, technical efficiency, and productivity performance. Consequently, the implications of the results to policy are twofold. First, African countries should use benchmarking practices with the region’s best-performing national innovation systems. Lastly, African countries have the potential to grow their economies through regional collaborative Science, Technology, and Innovation practices.

Research on Dynamic Capability and Enterprise Open Innovation

Chinese firms urgently need to use open innovation models to access external knowledge, resources, and skills to improve their internal innovation performance and achieve innovation catch-up. Using a dataset of joint patent applications of Chinese-listed manufacturing firms from 2006–2018, we construct a panel fixed-effects model to empirically test the effect of dynamic capabilities on firms’ open innovation. The results show that dynamic capabilities can effectively promote firms’ open innovation activities. In addition, the different dimensions of dynamic capabilities, namely sense capabilities, absorptive capabilities, complementary capabilities, and coordinative capabilities, also have significant incentive effects on firms’ open innovation. The results of the extended analysis show that dynamic capabilities have heterogeneous effects on the open innovation activities of different types of firms. Specifically, the impact of dynamic capabilities on open innovation is stronger for private firms, large and medium-sized firms, and multinational firms. The findings of this paper can provide important theoretical support and management insights for governments and enterprises to effectively manage the “paradox of openness” problem, thereby enhancing the firm’s innovation capability and achieving major bottleneck breakthroughs in key and core technologies.

Innovativeness and the relevance of political ties in Chinese MNEs

In light of emerging-market multinationals’ substantial engagement in strategic asset-seeking internationalization, this study explores the effects of home-country political ties on innovativeness and reverse innovation transfer in Chinese multinationals. Based on a survey of 99 Chinese multinationals and their 177 subsidiaries, the results reveal that headquarters’ political ties hamper their innovativeness, an important factor in stimulating subsidiary innovativeness and, in turn, reverse innovation transfer in Chinese multinationals. This study contributes to the literature on subsidiary entrepreneurship and emerging-market multinationals and suggests that, without a certain level of innovativeness at headquarters, relying only on strategic asset-seeking overseas investment to achieve innovation catch-up is problematic. Our findings point also to the co-evolving nature of Chinese multinationals’ competence growth and catch-up process, and support the view on the liability of stateness suffered by Chinese multinationals.

Introduction to the Special Issue on the New Silk Road of Innovation: R&D Networks, Knowledge Diffusions, and Open Innovation

Introduction to the Special Issue on the New Silk Road of Innovation: R&D Networks, Knowledge Diffusions, and Open Innovation

Do patent bubbles exist? Test on innovation situation in China’s A - share market

China’s expanding patent applicants reflects the results of the innovation catch-up strategy, but there have been persistent doubts about patent bubbles. Using SADF, GSADF and BSADF tests, this paper found that the phenomenon of the patent bubble is not common during the observation period in China’s listed companies from 2007 to 2019, and different degrees of patent bubbles occurred only in four industries. China’s technology market is still in the stage of innovation accumulation and catch-up.

Beyond catch-up: could China become the global innovation powerhouse? China’s innovation progress and challenges from a holistic innovation perspective

Over the past century and a half, global technological leadership has shifted from Europe to the United States, while scholars argue that the world has seen that it is now shifting from the United States to China due to China’s extraordinary catch-up in the past four decades, in which the public policy-oriented national innovation system development plays a critical role that might provide an alternative way for innovation-driven development especially for emerging markets. Even though encountering many challenges ahead, China is positioning itself to take over the global innovation leadership in the next few decades. Here in this article, we introduce a serious yet underexplored question: could China go beyond catch-up and become the global innovation powerhouse? Specifically, drawing from the holistic innovation perspective, which is an original theoretical paradigm for the mission-oriented innovation policy change, this article critically reviews, both qualitatively and quantitatively, China’s remarkable innovation progress and main drivers in comparison with G7 countries plus South Korea and India, trying to provide a comprehensive and critical view of state-of-the-art research on China’s innovation catch-up. We further explore the five major challenges that China must take seriously when marching toward the global innovation powerhouse. Finally, we propose a mission-oriented holistic STI policy design framework for both China and other emerging economies to go beyond catch-up in a competitive dynamic world. This article provides a new and holistic perspective to access China’s innovation progress and challenges, also generates novel insights for scholars and public agencies to contribute to global innovation development, with a shared goal of achieving global sustainable development in the post-COVID-19 pandemic world.

Research on the Path of Reverse Innovation: A Case Study of High-tech Industry Latecomer Firms in China

With the economic slowdown in developed countries and the rise of emerging economies, reverse innovation from developing countries has had a profound impact on the global changes of multinational companies. As a global innovation diffusion model, it plays a vital role in the late stage of company innovation catch-up. Reverse innovation is about to become an important means to international competition, so exploring how to effectively carry out and implement reverse innovation is of great guiding value to the management practice of multinational companies. First of all, this article reviews the relevant literature on reverse innovation and introduces the research status of this topic. Based on this, through a vertical case study of three representative companies in China's high-tech industry (Huawei, Galanz and Mindray), the article explores the innovation and development process of their products from three stages of imitation innovation, independent innovation and leading technology, and summarizes the three companies in reverse innovation success path. Finally, according to the successful experience of the case, the article puts forward suggestions to promote the development of high-tech enterprises from three aspects of expanding emerging markets, improving independent innovation ability and actively using policy resources, providing reference and inspiration for enterprises to improve innovation ability and accelerate internationalization process.

The role of absorptive capacity and opportunity capture in latecomer firms’ innovation catch-up

ABSTRACT Relevant literature tends to take innovation catch-up of emerging markets’ latecomer firms almost for granted. However, not all catch-up efforts are successful and some of these firms remain stuck in catching-up or exit from the market. In the search for explanations, this paper investigates the mediating effects of opportunity capture against those of technological innovation in the relationships with the performance of single dimensions of absorptive capacity. Hypotheses about the different ways in which absorptive capacity can be deployed are tested on data collected from 166 manufacturing firms in Guangdong Province (China). Findings support a stronger mediation effect of opportunity capture between absorptive capacity dimensions and firm’s performance than that of technological innovation. By using bootstrapped multiple mediation analysis and a multi-dimensional operationalisation of absorptive capacity, the study provides evidence of the relationships investigated, sheds light on some of their unintended effects on latecomer firms’ innovation catch-up and draws practical implications.

Research on the key success factors of reverse innovation of the latecomer engineering and technical services enterprises

Purpose – Reverse innovation plays an important role in the innovation catch-up by latecomer enterprise. With the development of economic globalization, reverse innovation of the latecomer enterprise research has received increased attention day by day. The purpose of this paper is to reveal the key success factors and the realization mechanism of reverse innovation of the latecomer engineering and technical services enterprise. Design/methodology/approach – This paper adopts the grounded theory analysis as the research method, by analyzing the phenomenon, collating the results, mining through the systematic data and verifying the theory temporarily. Therefore, it is ideal for the research to build the theory by analyzing the phenomenon. Before the serious coding begins, the reliability of coders is first examined. Coders extract some sample as the first test sample; then, three coders code according to the description and requirements and calculate the coding results according to the formulas that the noted scholar Holsti has proposed. Then, the authors perform the coding three times that include open coding, axial coding and selective coding, and then, the key factor model of reverse innovation of the engineering and technical service enterprise is refined. Findings – The investigation reveals that technology localization, connection with the international market and industrial chain integration are the key success factors of reverse innovation of the latecomer engineering and technological service enterprise. Meanwhile, the latecomer enterprise gives full attention to local comprehensive comparative advantage to carry out technology localization during the reverse innovation. The diversified international coupling mechanism is an important support for technology localization. The engineering and technical service enterprise needs to pay attention to the service chain of the vertical integration in the process of reverse innovation. Originality/value – The paper enriches the related research of reverse innovation based on a new industry and provides management support for innovation catch-up of the latecomer enterprises that have a big technological gap when compared with the multi-national companies.

Technological focus and connectivity: Evidence of newly industrialized countries in East Asia

Sourcing diverse sets of knowledge globally through co-inventor networks constitutes an opportunity for innovation catch-up for less developed countries. In this paper, we analyze global connectivity of Korea and Taiwan, the two Asian economies that achieved remarkable economic development in a short period of time, in terms of co-inventor network during their catch-up period from 1980 to 2010. Our results suggest that these two countries are not well-connected to the rest of the world when it comes to innovation networks. Further analyses show that, the two countries developed capabilities rapidly by focusing on emerging technologies, which might be the one of the reasons why both countries did not need to source established knowledge through the linkages to the rest of the world. Our results also show that the existence and development of business groups in these countries partly explain the low level of connectedness to the global innovation system.

Roadmapping for industrial emergence and innovation gaps to catch-up: a patent-based analysis of OLED industry in China

In recent years, emerging technologies have been attracting increasing attention, especially when those technology-follower countries attempt to develop new technology-based industries that contribute to their global innovation competitiveness. This paper proposes a framework for strategising and planning the emerging technologies-based industry in developing countries like China. This framework addresses three key issues for the technology-followers: 1) the significant capability gaps to catching-up in innovation; 2) the future external environment factors that may influence the innovation gaps; 3) the strategic development pathways that reduce these gaps. This framework integrates traditional roadmapping workshops and patent analysis. The organic light emitting diode (OLED) industry in China is selected as a case study. This study will contribute to the roadmapping and innovation catch-up literature, and will be of interest to OLED industry researchers.

Innovation catch-up enabled by the window of opportunity in high-velocity markets and the intrinsic capabilities of an enterprise: the case of HTC

A study of innovation catch-up enabled by the window of opportunity in high-velocity markets is carried out through the case study of HTC, which also analyses the required intrinsic capabilities of latecomer enterprise at different stages of the catch-up process. Key findings are as follows. Firstly, factors inducing the emergence of the window of opportunity are multi-dimensional. Secondly, the process of innovation catch-up enabled by the window of opportunity can be divided into three stages: identifying, breaking through and broadening the window of opportunity. The stage of identifying the window of opportunity requires the capabilities of perceptive market foresight and confident technology selection. The stage of breaking through the window of opportunity requires strong capabilities for decisive risk-taking actions in technology integration, complementary R&D investment, and new market development. Finally, the stage of broadening the window of opportunity requires the capabilities of close industrial network integration and rapid market expansion.

Accessing vs sourcing knowledge: A comparative study of R&D internationalization between emerging and advanced economy firms

Research and development (R&D) internationalization is on the rise for advanced economy multinationals (AMNEs) as well as emerging economy multinationals (EMNEs). We study EMNE R&D internationalization by comparing it to that by AMNEs in the context of an emerging, knowledge-intensive industry. We find that these two are fundamentally different processes. While the internationalization of AMNEs’ R&D activities can largely be explained in terms of the twin strategies of competence exploitation and competence creation, EMNE R&D internationalization is rooted in the firms’ overall catch up strategy to get on par with industry leaders. An in-depth comparison of knowledge flows reveals that within AMNEs, headquarters often serves the primary source of knowledge for R&D subsidiaries. In contrast, within EMNEs, headquarters accesses knowledge from R&D subsidiaries in advanced economies for innovation catch-up. Within this dichotomy, the innovative capabilities of EMNE headquarters develop more slowly and with greater difficulty than those of AMNE subsidiaries.