Technological Innovation Paths Research Articles

Technological innovation paths toward green industry in China

With the environmental carrying capacity reaching its limits and the decreasing margin benefits of traditional production factors, the green transformation and green development through technologic...

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

Organizational Path Constitution in Technological Innovation: Evidence from Rural Telehealth

Path constitution theory has emerged as a promising combination of two contrasting perspectives on technological innovation: path dependence, which focuses on historically embedded, contingent processes that are more or less beyond the control of actors, and path creation, which emphasizes mindful contributions from powerful actors. However, the current path constitution literature focuses on macro- and multi-level inquiry without addressing the specific processes, opportunities, and challenges related to organizational (micro-level) technological innovation. Against this backdrop, we draw on the innovation and path literature as well as a case study of telehealth innovation in a public health organization to theorize how technological innovation paths constitute in organizational contexts. The proposed theory distinguishes between innovation path status and innovation path trajectory to help researchers understand and explain how organizations transform and reinforce path constitution patterns, how innovation paths may merge with or separate from other paths, and how organizations may arrive at a lock-in that challenges them to break out from dominant and seemingly irreversible action patterns.

Government R & D Subsidies, Political Relations and Technological SMEs Innovation Transformation

This paper studies the effect of government research and development (R&D) subsidies and political relations on the innovative activities of technological small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, the technology innovation path of SMEs is an important issue related to government R&D subsidies. This paper explores these effects using multiple case studies. Through case analyses of four biological pharmaceutical enterprises, we found that first, technological SMEs that receive a significant amount of government R&D subsidies will transform from exploitative innovation to explorative innovation in a short amount of time, whereas technological SMEs that receive less government R&D subsidies will perform less innovative activities over a long time. Second, technological SMEs with strong political relations tend to do more explorative innovation, whereas technological SMEs with weak political relations tend to do more exploitative innovation. Third, technological SMEs with strong political relations will promote the positive effect of government R&D subsidies on their innovation performance.

Focus on Authors

Focus on Authors

Predicting the Path of Technological Innovation: SAW vs. Moore, Bass, Gompertz, and Kryder

Competition is intense among rival technologies, and success depends on predicting their future trajectory of performance. To resolve this challenge, managers often follow popular heuristics, generalizations, or “laws” such as Moore's law. We propose a model, Step And Wait (SAW), for predicting the path of technological innovation, and we compare its performance against eight models for 25 technologies and 804 technologies-years across six markets. The estimates of the model provide four important results. First, Moore's law and Kryder's law do not generalize across markets; neither holds for all technologies even in a single market. Second, SAW produces superior predictions over traditional methods, such as the Bass model or Gompertz law, and can form predictions for a completely new technology by incorporating information from other categories on time-varying covariates. Third, analysis of the model parameters suggests that (i) recent technologies improve at a faster rate than old technologies; (ii) as the number of competitors increases, performance improves in smaller steps and longer waits; (iii) later entrants and technologies that have a number of prior steps tend to have smaller steps and shorter waits; but (iv) technologies with a long average wait time continue to have large steps. Fourth, technologies cluster in their performance by market.

Democratization is the driving force for technological and economic change

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between democratization and technological innovation. In primis, the paper shows, through economic history, that democratization is an antecedent process (cause) to technological and economic change (effect). In particular, the primary finding is that democratization is a driving force for technological change: most free countries, measured with liberal, participatory, and constitutional democracy indices, have a higher level of technology than less free and more autocratic countries. In fact, “democracy richness” generates a higher rate of technological innovation with fruitful effects for the wellbeing and wealth of nations. These findings and predictions lead to the conclusion that policy makers need to be cognizant of positive associations between democratization and technological innovation paths in order to support the modern economic growth and future technological progress of countries.

Environmental Efficiency, Emission Trends and Labour Productivity: Trade-Off or Joint Dynamics? Empirical Evidence Using NAMEA Panel Data

The paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between environmental efficiency and labour productivity using industry level data. We first provide a critical and extensive discussion around the interconnected issues of environmental efficiency and performance, firm performances and labour productivity, and environmental and non-environmental innovation dynamics. The most recent literature dealing with environmental innovation, environmental regulations and economic performances is taken as reference. We then test a newly adapted EKC hypothesis, by verifying the correlation between the two trends of environmental efficiency (productivity, namely sector emission on added value) and labour productivity (added value on employees) over a dynamic path. We exploit official NAMEA data sources for Italy over 1990-2002 for 29 sectoral branches. The period is crucial since environmental issues and then environmental policies came into the arena, and a restructuring of the economy occurred. It is thus interesting to assess the extent to which capital investments for the economy as a whole are associated with a positive or negative correlation between environmental efficiency of productive branches and labour productivity, often claimed by mainstream theory dealing with innovation in environmental economics. We believe that on the basis of the theoretical and empirical analyses focusing on innovation paths, firm performances and environmental externalities, there are good reasons to expect a positive correlation between environmental and labour productivities, or in alternative terms a negative correlation between mission intensity of production and labour productivity. The tested hypothesis is crucial within the long standing discussion over the potential trade-off or complementarity between environmental and labour productivity, strictly associated with sectoral and national technological innovation paths. The main added value of the paper is the analysis of the aforementioned hypothesis by exploiting a panel data set based on official NAMEA sectoral disaggregated accounting data, providing both cross section heterogeneity and a sufficient time span. We find that for most emissions, if not all, a negative correlation emerges between labour productivity and environmental productivity. Though this trend appears driven by the macro sectors services, manufacturing and industry, this evidence is not homogenous across emissions. In some cases U-shapes arise, mainly for services, and the assessment of Turning Points is crucial. Manufacturing and industry, all in all, seem to have a stronger weight. Overall, then, labour productivity dynamics seem to be complementary to a decreasing emission intensity of productive processes. The extent to which this evidence derives from endogenous market forces, industrial restructuring and/or from policy effects is scope for further research. The relative role of manufacturing and services in explaining this pattern is also to be analysed in future empirical analyses. In addition, the role of capital stocks and trade openness are extensions which may add value to future analyses carried out on the same NAMEA dataset.