Innovative Labor Research Articles

Do Manufacturing Firms in China Innovate?

This article provides empirical light on the debate concerning whether manufacturing firms in China are becoming major innovators. Based on an innovation survey carried out in Jiangsu Province, the article finds that most firms engage in innovative activities but these are mainly of an incremental nature. Radical innovation, as a proportion of sales, is relatively low if compared internationally. Innovation in China is mainly to catch-up and is novel relative to the firm and the domestic market. A small proportion of innovation is new to the world. Intensity and productivity indicators suggest that small, foreign and textile firms are leading innovative efforts. Firms innovate to improve their general competitiveness, including improving product quality and extending market share, obtain income from technology and defend themselves from research and development expenditure by competitors. Innovators value significantly more than non-innovators the range of innovative objectives they seek to achieve. The main obstacles to innovation arise from technical and marketing weaknesses; the perception of these obstacles varies widely between radical innovators and non-innovators. The article concludes that while innovative activities are emerging it will still take some time for China to have a major role in the international division of innovative labour.

Globalisation and the politics of negative pluralism

Using Africa as an example, the author suggests how globalisation in the form of innovative and capitalist intensive technology marginalises labour while creating a technically informed elite. The division between them represent social cleavages based on high risk and functional polarisation, both of which lead to divisive rather than mediating forms of pluralism. In such instances interests become elevated to principles, particularly around parochial affiliations, loyalties and jurisdictions, not to speak of propensities to violence.

Innovative capabilities and strategic alliances: Who is gaining what in the pharmaceutical industry?

There have been several respected studies, from a capability-based perspective, pointing to the emergence of a new division of innovative labour in the pharmaceutical industry over the past decades. We still, however, miss empirical evidence relative to the implications of collaborative arrangements, like strategic alliances, for the innovative capabilities of companies involved in such collaborative arrangements. Drawing on a scrutiny of specialised databases (Gale, Dialog, and Business & Industry) covering the 1993–2003 period, this paper examines the entry and exit composition of innovative capabilities of 25 pharmaceutical companies’ capabilities involved in such alliances. They are organised in three groups: (i) large pharmaceutical companies (‘big-pharma’); (ii) large bio-pharmaceutical companies (‘bio-pharma’); and (iii) small and research-intensive companies. The evidence shows the extent to which each of these three types companies, particularly large companies, benefit from these alliances in terms of absorption of strategic pieces of innovative capabilities. Such type of evidence is important to provide researchers, corporate managers, and policy makers with a concrete notion of some features of the nature of such division of innovative labour that occurs and the actual changes going on in the structure and organisation of innovative activities in the pharmaceutical industry.

Firm-level training in local economic systems: Complementarities in production and firm innovation strategies

The paper presents a conceptual review over the main aspects concerning the role of human capital investments and training activities within production processes, followed by empirical evidence on two local economic systems in Northern Italy, based on recent survey data. Theoretical and empirical considerations are brought together in order to provide new insights on the role of training and the factors associated to training activities at firm level. The potential driving factors of training here analysed compounds structural characteristics, labour demand dynamics, human resource management practices, workforce features, and firm performances. We observe that training activities emerge positively associated with high-performance practices, innovative labour demand features, workforce skill level, firm size, and are affected by labour flexibility in various directions. Empirical evidence confirms most previous results but also adds further important insights. The analysis suggests that a widening gap, between few innovatively evolving and many stagnant firms, could characterise the future dynamics of the Region. The high relevance of structural variables, labour demand factors and HRM/innovation practices shows that regional industrial policies and labour policies should be jointly implemented for increasing potential firm productivity. This is a key concern for the current debate on local systems economic development in the European and Italian environment.

The organizational evolution of innovative activity in the US semiconductor industry: Technological specialization and diversification

This article analyzes the organizational evolution of innovative activity in the contemporary high-tech industry. It has been argued that by showing illuminating examples and proposing theoretical explanations, the innovation process has been fragmented and distributed among several organizations. In other words, ‘division of innovative labor’ emerges. However, one of the problems of this argument lies in its lack of systematic empirical analysis. Using the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent database, this article analyzes the organization of innovative activity in the US semiconductor industry. It is shown that ‘technological specialization’ has not occurred in this industry as a whole. In addition, it is also shown that there are two distinct modes of development of technology, namely, ‘specialized development of technology’ and ‘diversified development of technology’, in which the share of the latter has been steadily increasing. These results imply that contrary to the earlier conventional arguments, division of labor is not a common phenomenon in the production of technological knowledge.

Patents and the division of innovative labor

Comment on “Specialized supply firms, property rights, and firm boundaries” by Ashish Arora and Robert Merges Arora and Merges (A&M) bring up a fairly unexplored topic. There is a growing economic and managerial literature on patents and intellectual property rights (IPRs). However, little attention has been paid to the implications of stronger or weaker IPRs for the vertical specialization of industries (Grindley and Teece, 1997 or Teece, 1998 being exceptions). According to A&M, an underappreciated implication of well-enforced patents is that they raise the bargaining power of smaller technology specialist firms in transactions in which they supply their technologies. Asymmetry in size and bargaining power is common in these transactions. Many technology specialist firms are small compared to the technology buyers (often large manufacturing companies). The problem arises because the specialists have no means to appropriate the rents from their inventions other than a legal stake on them. Weak IPRs then have two consequences. The technology suppliers may try to integrate downstream to secure the rents on their technologies by embodying them in the final products, a point made by Gans and Stern (2003). Alternatively, they have not enough incentives to create the technology in the first place. As a result, weak IPRs limit the division of labor because either the technology specialists become integrated firms themselves or the manufacturing firms have to integrate upstream since there are too few independent suppliers around.

Technological outsourcing and product diversification: do markets for technology affect firms’ strategies?

This paper analyses how the existence of competitive technology markets affects firms’ technology sourcing decisions, and their propensity to enter into new product markets. While the division of innovative labour has received increasing attention within the economic literature, this paper focuses on its managerial implications. By means of a specialised database, we assess how patterns of technology trade influence firms’ technology and diversification strategies in the chemical industry. We find that, the larger the market for technology, the stronger the advantages to substitute internal R&D with outsourcing, and to increase the degree of product diversification.

Mapping the Dimensions of Labor Revitalization: Movement Innovators Survey the California Frontier

In light of the ongoing dialogue regarding the possibility and potential for revitalizing the U.S. labor movement, this paper seeks to map systematically the emblematic activities of this re-emergence. An inventory of innovative and promising labor movement activity is compiled and analyzed through semi-structured interviews with labor scholars, community leaders, organizers, and union officials in California. Analysis of the data suggests several emerging patterns: (1) the declining role of traditional union activity in the new labor movement, (2) the importance of immigrant workers to labor's revitalization, and (3) the absence of white-collar workers from the range of labor activity viewed as promising.

Division of Innovative Labor Between the U.S. and Japan in Asia‐Pacific Technology Markets: Evidence from the Licensing Contracts of American and Japanese Firms with Korean Firms*

This paper empirically investigates the role of the U.S. and Japan in the Asia‐Pacific technology market, in particular, their relationship with Korea based on a survey data set.Korean firms tend to import their technologies from the U.S. rather than from Japan for new business expansion and enhancing technological capabilities, while Japanese technol‐ogies are more likely to be imported for domestic market expansion through quality improvement and production capacity expansion. The relationship between the licensor and licensee is more likely to be vertical for the technologies imported from the U.S. than Japanese ones. Compared with the technologies from the U.S., Japanese technologies are cheaper and are easier to find alternatives. The licensees that imported technologies from Japan tend to care more about the current or ongoing relation‐ship with existing relational networks such as the existing licensor and/or joint‐venture partners as the information channel for technology import decisions. U.S. technologies have been more likely to be the pathfinder for Korean companies in developing new markets, developing new products, upgrading technological capabilities. Technologies from the U.S. and Japan have been utilized for different market segments with different strategic purposes.

Taking on "Big Chicken"

Although efforts to organize workers in the new economy have attracted considerable scholarly and media attention, significant battlegrounds remain in old-economy industries that have suc cessfully resisted union penetration. Unions have been employing new strategies in their attempts to recruit workers in those unor ganized sectors. This case study analyzes one such initiative, the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance (DPJA), an innovative labor- community coalition that is supporting union organizing in the nation's expanding poultry industry. DPJA's experiences illustrate some of the challenges unions face in entering alliances guided by a community organizing approach and offer significant insights into how enduring labor-community coalitions can be developed. Its experience also illuminates the current debate over the extent to which internal union culture must change in order for organiz ing to succeed, and suggests how labor-community coalitions can influence union strategy.

Markets for Technology: The Economics of Innovation and Corporate Strategy

The past two decades have seen a gradual but noticeable change in the economic organization of innovative activity. Most firms used to integrate research and development with activities such as production, marketing, and distribution. Today firms are forming joint ventures, research and development alliances, licensing deals, and a variety of other outsourcing arrangements with universities, technology-based start-ups, and other established firms. In many industries, a division of innovative labor is emerging, with a substantial increase in the licensing of existing and prospective technologies. In short, technology and knowledge are becoming definable and tradable commodities.Although researchers have made significant advances in understanding the determinants and consequences of innovation, until recently they have paid little attention to how innovation functions as an economic process. This book examines the nature and workings of markets for intermediate technological inputs. It looks first at how industry structure, the nature of knowledge, and intellectual property rights facilitate the development of technology markets. It then examines the impacts of these markets on firm boundaries, the division of labor within the economy, industry structure, and economic growth. Finally, it examines the implications of this framework for public policy and corporate strategy. Combining theoretical perspectives from economics and management with empirical analysis, the book also draws on historical evidence and case studies to flesh out its research results.

University Research and Offices of Technology Transfer

Both universities and firms are engaged in the same overarching dynamic technological innovation processes. All researchers pursue a combination of the three Fs of fame, fortune, and freedom regardless of whether they are or corporate. It is the different alignments of incentives and constraints that induce academic researchers to have a comparative advantage in some kinds of innovation and those in commercial R&D to have a comparative advantage in other kinds of innovation. This results in a division of innovative labor and creates opportunities for gains to be made from trade in technologies. Offices of technology transfer were created to improve this flow of trade between university research and industry by patenting and marketing university research results and fostering startups using university technologies. This article examines the business of technology transfer. The extent of university patenting is still very small relative to industry, and technology transfer revenues are still very small relative to university research budgets. While university technology transfer is growing rapidly, the policy foundations and the marketing models on which it is built will need to evolve further to better fit the underlying economic realities of the dynamic technological innovation processes they are intended to promote.

Recasting labour studies in the new millennium

Abstract The paper examines the sociological study of labour and argues that in the past it has tended to be Eurocentric, ignoring the innovative labour movements that emerged in the semi-industrialized countries in the seventies and eighties. These new unions are more like social movements anchored in the community. Northern labour movements have a lot to learn from these new unions as they rethink their role under the impact of neo-liberal globalization. The paper suggests that globalization has opened up opportunities for new forms of labour internationalism as well as the possibilities of a revitalization of the northern labour movement. We conclude by suggesting that the restructuring of work has profoundly changed the context in which the self activity of workers takes place. This has implications for the research agenda of sociologists that forces us to cross new boundaries between those who study the new social movements and those who focus on the sociology of work. In a nutshell, there is a need to broaden and deepen the study of labour movements in the new millennium.

A Comparison of U.S. and European University-Industry Relations in the Life Sciences

We draw on diverse data sets to compare the institutional organization of upstream life science research across the United States and Europe. Understanding cross-national differences in the organization of innovative labor in the life sciences requires attention to the structure and evolution of biomedical networks involving public research organizations (universities, government laboratories, nonprofit research institutes, and research hospitals), science-based biotechnology firms, and multinational pharmaceutical corporations. We use network visualization methods and correspondence analyses to demonstrate that innovative research in biomedicine has its origins in regional clusters in the United States and in European nations. But the scientific and organizational composition of these regions varies in consequential ways. In the United States, public research organizations and small firms conduct R&D across multiple therapeutic areas and stages of the development process. Ties within and across these regions link small firms and diverse public institutions, contributing to the development of a robust national network. In contrast, the European story is one of regional specialization with a less diverse group of public research organizations working in a smaller number of therapeutic areas. European institutes develop local connections to small firms working on similar scientific problems, while cross-national linkages of European regional clusters typically involve large pharmaceutical corporations. We show that the roles of large and small firms differ in the United States and Europe, arguing that the greater heterogeneity of the U.S. system is based on much closer integration of basic science and clinical development.

Flexible Labour Strategy in the Dutch Automotive Industry

Labour flexibility is a major way for companies to become more flexible. Why companies use flexible labour relations varies widely per industry. We assess the development of labour flexibility within the Dutch automotive industry. Four cases, together representing the production chain, are presented. We show how and why these companies arrived at the high level of sophistication in labour relations they currently have and what combinations of internal and external, numerical and functional forms have emerged. The process has been one of trial and error, characterised by emerging rather than deliberate strategy. It has a clear pattern over time. In three out of our four companies, an innovative labour use strategy emerged, finely tuned to market demands, new institutional realities and specific company needs.

Employment dynamics in the Italian telecommunications industry

Important quantitative and qualitative changes are affecting employment in the telecommunications manufacturing and services industry worldwide, namely the selective downsizing of employment stocks, the reshaping of job contents and employment composition, and the adoption of innovative labour practices. By resorting to micro-data from the archives of the Italian Institute for Social Security, the paper outlines employment dynamics in the Italian telecommunications industry between 1986 and 1995. Most notable changes detected for public telecommunications operators include the acceleration of inter-companies labour flows and the development of an external labour market for higher skilled employees. However, personnel policies to protect the holders of less tradable skills still exist.

Nonstandard work: the nature and challenges of changing employment arrangements

In recent years, much attention has focused on the growth of nonstandard and contingent employment (including part-time work) which involves up to 30 percent of the total U.S. labor force. There is little agreement on either the causes or the effects of this trend. Some researchers emphasize the advantages: employees may explore the job market and obtain work that does not necessarily involve rigid schedules, while employers enjoy greater flexibility and lower costs. Others point to the disadvantages for employees, such as lack of job security, fewer benefits and chances for promotion, and often lower wages. Drawbacks for employers include a workforce that has little chance to develop firm-specific knowledge or loyalty.Chapters in Nonstandard Work: The Nature and Challenges of Emerging Employment Arrangements carefully analyze the extent and nature of various nonstandard work arrangements; their advantages and disadvantages for employees and employers; the demographic, industrial, and occupational distribution of such positions; and the question of whether standard employment itself is changing. Some contributors consider how innovative labor market intermediaries and unions might expand opportunities for workers while also helping firms to raise their productivity.

Commercial development of environmental technologies for the automotive industry towards a new model of technological innovation

Economic importance of issues is increasing, and new technologies are expected to reduce pollution derived both from productive processes and products, with costs that are still unknown. Until now, there is still little knowledge concerning the process of technological innovation in this field. What does exist is outdated due to rapid change in technology. In this paper, we analyse the development of Zinc Air Fuel Cells (ZAFC) and their transfer from research laboratories to large mass production. ZAFC are a new environmental technology, proved to have a commercial value, that can be used for building Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEV). Although ZAFC performances are higher than traditional lead-acid batteries ones, difficulties in funding ZAFC engineering and moving them from laboratories to production caused some years delay in their diffusion. On the basis of this paradigmatic case, we argue that existing economic and organisational literature concerning technological innovation is not able to fully explain steps followed in developing technologies. Existing models mainly consider adoption problems as due to market uncertainty, weak appropriability regime, lack of a dominant design, and difficulties in reconfiguring organisational routines. Additionally, the following aspects play a fundamental role in developing technologies, pointing out how technological trajectories depend both on exogenous market conditions and endogenous firm competencies: 1. regulations concerning introduction of ZEV market demand and business development for new technologies; they impose constraints that can be met only by segmenting transportation market at each stage of technology development; 2. each stage of technology development requires alternative forms of division and coordination of innovative labour; upstream and downstream industries are involved in new forms of inter-firm relationships, causing a reconfiguration of product architecture and reducing effects of path dependency; 3. product differentiation increases firm capabilities to plan at the same time technology introduction and customer selection, while meeting requirements concerning network externalities; 4. it is necessary to find and/or create alternative funding sources for each research, development and design stage of the new technologies. From this discussion, we will draw some conclusions and issues for further researches concerning government policy and firms' strategies for sustaining the process of technological innovation and transfer.

Commercial development of environmental technologies for the automotive industry towards a new model of technological innovation

Economic importance of environmental issues is increasing, and new technologies are expected to reduce pollution derived both from productive processes and products, with costs that are still unknown. Until now, there is still little knowledge concerning the process of technological innovation in this field. What does exist is outdated due to rapid change in technology. In this paper, we analyse the development of Zinc Air Fuel Cells (ZAFC) and their transfer from research laboratories to large mass production. ZAFC are a new "environmental technology", proved to have a commercial value, that can be used for building Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEV). Although ZAFC performances are higher than traditional lead-acid batteries ones, difficulties in funding ZAFC engineering and "moving" them from laboratories to production caused some years delay in their diffusion. On the basis of this "paradigmatic" case, we argue that existing economic and organisational literature concerning technological innovation is not able to fully explain steps followed in developing environmental technologies. Existing models mainly consider adoption problems as due to market uncertainty, weak appropriability regime, lack of a dominant design, and difficulties in reconfiguring organisational routines. Additionally, the following aspects play a fundamental role in developing environmental technologies, pointing out how technological trajectories depend both on exogenous market conditions and endogenous firm competencies: 1. regulations concerning introduction of ZEV "create" market demand and business development for new technologies; they impose constraints that can be met only by segmenting transportation market at each stage of technology development; 2. each stage of technology development requires alternative forms of division and coordination of innovative labour; upstream and downstream industries are involved in new forms of inter-firm relationships, causing a reconfiguration of product architecture and reducing effects of path dependency; 3. product differentiation increases firm capabilities to plan at the same time technology introduction and customer selection, while meeting requirements concerning "network externalities"; 4. it is necessary to find and/or create alternative funding sources for each research, development and design stage of the new technologies. From this discussion, we will draw some conclusions and issues for further researches concerning government policy and firms' strategies for sustaining the process of technological innovation and transfer.

Wage Divergence and Unemployment: The Impact of Insider Power and Training Costs

The US labour market is characterized by a high skill wage mark-up and low unemployment, while the German labour market has a low skill wage mark-up and a high, mainly unskilled unemployment rate. This paper adds an innovative labour supply explanation to the discussion how these distinct labour market equilibria could arise. Skill-biased technological change induces training needs for the employees willing to work in the skilled labour market and increases relative skill demand. In a simple general equilibrium model, this paper shows that skilled insiders in the USA enjoy higher rents and increase the skilled wage mark-up stronger than in Germany in the wake of skill-biased technological change. The reason is that the unskilled outsiders in the USA do not possess a powerful credible threat to improve their position. This is a consequence from higher training and education costs in the USA for unskilled employees and unemployed. In Germany, the lower skill wage mark-up leads to an increased relative skill demand which is not matched by the skill supply and therefore mis-match unemployment arises.