Science-based Industries Research Articles

Technology and Technique: Resources for Global History

Abstract: The past twenty years have seen an effort on the part of economic history to try to think and describe the role of knowledge in economic growth. Economic historians have made ample use of the notion of “knowledge economy,” focusing on engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs in the industrial context. As a result, technology has been seen as a resource and an asset for companies. In this context it has been aligned with applied science and science-based industry. The development of global history has challenged this understanding, by questioning the meaning of technology in different contexts to those of industry and by fostering a reflexion on the need for an alternative terminology. This article sheds light on the resource provided by the word “technique,” in the meaning it has acquired in French (“la technique”) for rethinking technology in global history.

Commercialisation patterns of scientific knowledge in traditional low- and medium-tech industries

Research on technology commercialisation and science–industry interactions overlooks the specificity of connections between science and traditional low- and medium-technology (TLMT) industries. The few studies on science-based innovation in TLMT industries focus on barriers to investing, accessing, and creating value from science. This is problematic as TLMT industries exhibit different innovation patterns compared to high-tech and science-based industries. Therefore, we focus on the patterns arising from technology commercialisation processes utilised by TLMT firms to create value from scientific knowledge and technology. We used a qualitative multiple case study design and identified four types of commercialisation patterns in TLMT industries: scientification, optimising nature, orchestration, and technification. Our typology contributes to research in traditional industries and technology commercialisation by demonstrating firms' commercialisation patterns and the diverse ways in which they capture value within TLMT industries.

Manufacturing Productivity and FDI Externalities: is Small Beautiful?

The role of FDI as a vehicle for economic growth is debatable in practice. On the other hand, the size of the company and the technological groups can influence the occurrence and magnitude of FDI externalities. Thus, this article investigates the impact of firm size on the occurrence of foreign direct investment externalities in the Portuguese industry from 1995 to 2007, by technology groups, using panel data at the firm level. To this end, we estimate the TFP and regress it on a set of variables, including the foreign presence in the same sector, upstream and downstream. The results show that only (small and large) companies in scale-intensive industries; and small firms in science-based industries benefit from the positive externalities of FDI. This suggests that firm size can influence the occurrence of FDI externalities in the manufacturing sector, but only in some technology groups. Based on the results, investment policy recommendations are made.

Feasibility of Building a Biotech Industry

The performance of Cuban biotechnology from 2008 to 2021 has shown a growing pipeline of valuable biomedical solutions. As the transformation of this sector into an industrial group has changed its R&D productivity and bio manufacturing capacity, we summarize here the results of R&D projects with impact on public health, constraints found in Cuba, lessons, and opportunities to develop this science-based industry in developing countries.

Exploring redundancies in multichannel knowledge sourcing in high-technology industries

ObjetivoColaborações científicas representam links externos informais que, juntamente com alianças formais de P&D, constituem uma rede de fornecimento de conhecimento multicanal em indústrias baseadas na ciência. Embora essa fonte multicanal de conhecimento beneficie as empresas ao fornecer um acesso mais completo a fontes externas, ela também envolve redundâncias potenciais significativas que merecem consideração. Essas redundâncias resultam da sobreposição de conhecimentos específicos e requisitos de recursos chave semelhantes, incluindo orçamento e pessoal de pesquisa. Apesar de sua importância, a literatura não fornece uma descrição completa das possíveis causas e contingências dessas redundâncias. O presente estudo dá um passo nessa direção, primeiro verificando sua existência, seguido por um estudo das contingências-chave que determinam a extensão dessas redundâncias.Design/Metodologia/AbordagemEste é um artigo empírico que usa o contexto da indústria farmacêutica para testar a interação entre colaborações científicas e alianças de P&D como impulsionadores do desempenho inovador de uma empresa farmacêutica manifestada na produtividade de suas patentes.ResultadosA análise empírica revela que o efeito das colaborações científicas e alianças de P&D é de fato parcialmente substituto ou redundante, e que a referida redundância é maior para empresas com baixa capacidade de absorção, utilização desequilibrada dos dois tipos de links externos e seu tamanho.Originalidadeesta é uma das primeiras tentativas empíricas de explorar os efeitos substitutos de colaborações científicas e parcerias de P&D no nível da empresa. Incorporar contingências importantes, como capacidade de absorção, utilização equilibrada de relacionamentos e tamanho da empresa, aumenta ainda mais a novidade e originalidade de nossa pesquisa.

The Entrepreneurial Culture and Bureaucracy in Twentieth-Century America

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.

Complementarity effect in the innovation strategy: internal R&D and acquisition of capital with embodied technology

For scale-intensive industries and science-based industries in Germany, we investigate the question whether firms combining internal R&D and acquisition of capital with embodied technology demonstrate better product and process innovation performance than companies using only one of those innovation strategies. Our approach comprises both indirect and direct complementarity tests between those two innovation activities. The empirical results suggest that the combination strategy provides a distinct advantage to companies both in producing product and process innovations. In particular, in product innovations, firms demonstrate a higher novelty degree of their goods, while in process innovations they provide a higher quality improvement (in the science-based industries only) and a significant cost reduction (in the science-based and scale-intensive industries).

External knowledge flows and innovation capacity: the Italian service industries

ABSTRACTThis work explores the relationship between R&D activities, as well as cooperation agreements, and the innovation capacity of service firms. Accounting for interdependencies among variable, we verify whether external research is complementary or substitute for the internal research activities and whether the combination of external and internal sources of knowledge has a stronger impact on the innovation capacity of the science-based service industries. We also evaluate the gains from performing both internal and external R&D in science-based firms involved in cooperation agreements for innovation. Finally, to our knowledge, this work represents the first attempt to investigate the impact of several sources of knowledge and their combination on firms’ innovation intensity. According to our findings, the most important source of innovation is the internal one. Collaborations with public or private institutions seem to be more beneficial for firms involved in more intense innovation activities.

The impact of the 2008 financial crisis on innovation: A dominant design perspective

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on innovation, as measured by the emergence of dominant designs. A negative impact is substantiated theoretically and empirically, based on longitudinal patent data from the OECD. This study also finds evidence for the moderating impact of globalization on the relationship between innovative performance and the emergence of dominant design. Thus, globalization is more important with regard to the establishment of dominant designs than it was before the financial crisis of 2008. Further, it is found that following the crisis, science-based industries tend to have more dominant designs than other industries.

Exploring scientific publications by firms: what are the roles of academic and corporate partners for publications in high reputation or high impact journals?

Recent research suggests that firms, particularly in science-based industries, may publish scientific articles in order to achieve strategic goals. This paper explores whether the reputation seen as publications in journals with high impact factors and the impact seen as citations of such scientific publications originating in firms benefit from R&D alliances with different types of partners. Our empirical analysis is based on a unique dataset in pharmaceutical cancer research. We analyze publications originating in biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms, with a comparison of the results to publications that do not involve a firm-based author. Our results indicate that the returns to the number of partners are decreasing and are negative after a turning point. More surprisingly, our results suggest that biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms should focus on establishing R&D alliances with pharmaceutical firms in order to increase the probability of publishing in journals with a high reputation. However, in terms of scientific impact, i.e., forward citations, publications originating in firms do not benefit from having access to different types of alliance partners.

Markets for Technology in Europe – Mapping Demand and its Drivers

Functioning markets for technology are an important determinant for the type, scope and distribution of innovation activities in an economy. However, markets for technology are often underdeveloped or inefficient. Existing theory attributes such imperfections to the supply side or differences in market designs. We know comparatively little, though, about the structural forces that shape the demand side of markets for technology. In this study, we reason that demand depends on the sectoral pattern of innovation and the distance of a country’s industry to the global technological frontier. We explore these dimensions based on longitudinal industry-level data from the Community Innovation Survey. We find that the demand on markets for technology is particularly driven by science-based industries and to a lesser degree by scale-intensive industries. Demand decreases, though, the closer industries are to the technological frontier. These findings highlight sector specific opportunities and constraints for policies promoting markets for technology.

A century of scientific publication: towards a theorization of growth behavior and research-orientation

This paper attempts to provide an overview of scientific publication trends over the period of a century (1900–2017). It then drills down to three important explorations that depict world trends and the development of science, namely: the growth behaviors of different time periods; fields and research orientations; and cumulative capability patterns of different countries by size of population. To study growth behaviors, we employed logistic growth function to model the world publication trajectory. We observed that the carrying capacity of the world publication trajectory has increased, attaining a much higher level of production. The rate of publication for the period of 1990–2017 has elongated the cycle and witnessed a longer trend towards saturation. For research activities in recent decades, we noted that they were performed by coordinated entities that are endowed to chart a multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary research path. Publications were found to be oriented towards medical and industrial applications, which can be attributed to the attempts of emerging countries which aspire to develop science-based industries. The analyses and observations in this paper have enabled us to corroborate our previous findings on growth behaviors of scientific publications. We believe that these findings will allow us to theorize further on the world development of science, and realize a strong theoretical narrative for a century of publication in the near future.

Integration and Competition for Innovation in Science-Based Industries

We develop a model for how innovation competition affects the organization of research activity and property-rights allocation in science-based industries. We consider a vertical production process with division of labor between research and commercialization. We analyze firms' incentive for integration in the presence of upstream innovation competition. Integration adversely affects integrated firms' R&D investment and creates positive externality for independent firms. For a sufficiently strong externality, a semi-integrated structure appears in equilibrium. Thus, the model can explain the coexistence of integrated and independent research firms and conforms to evidence of R&D competition in science-based industries. A non-integrated arrangement can sometimes appear in equilibrium although a semi-integrated arrangement has higher innovation probability and aggregate industry payoff, because parties that gain from integration cannot commit to compensate losing parties at the contracting stage. We analyze the effects of resource constraints and inter-customer licensing on industry structure and their implications for innovation competition.

Regional knowledge, entrepreneurial culture, and innovative start-ups over time and space\u2015an empirical investigation

We investigate the role of entrepreneurship culture and the historical knowledge base of a region on current levels of new business formation in innovative industries. The analysis is for German regions and covers the time period 1907–2014. We find a pronounced positive relationship between high levels of historical self-employment in science-based industries and new business formation in innovative industries today. This long-term legacy effect of entrepreneurial tradition indicates the prevalence of a regional culture of entrepreneurship. Moreover, local presence and geographic proximity to a technical university founded before the year 1900 is positively related to the level of innovative start-ups more than a century later. The results show that a considerable part of the knowledge that constitutes an important source of entrepreneurial opportunities is deeply rooted in history. We draw conclusions for policy and for further research.

Перспективы реиндустриализации развитых экономик (США, Канада и Австралия)

The article looks into the most important aspects of the world economy reindustrialization, examines strategies for reindustrialization of the USA, Canada, and Australia. The correlation between the world trend, namely the transition to the digital economy, and the process of reindustrialization within the framework of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is considered. On the basis of comparison and analysis of expert evaluations, statistical data by sectors of industrial production of the USA and Canada it is shown that the absolute advantage of Canada when carrying out the re-industrialization of the economy is skilled labor, specialists with secondary education. The study confirms the fact that amid the reindustrialization on the verge of the Fourth industrial revolution, the availability of skilled labor is a necessary condition for the competitiveness of the state. The Russian Federation faces the situation when conducting the re-industrialization is complicated by adverse international economic and political environment (policy of sanctions against Russia). It is revealed that for the Russian Federation the reindustrialization of the economy shall combine the active modernization of the existing production capacity, while shaping new industries on the basis of technologies of the sixth technology wave. The comparative analysis outlined that under the circumstances the drivers of the new industrialization should be science-based industries, with the latest technologies and the largest number of highly skilled personnel concentrating there.

Russian Education for Innovative Economy: “the Pressure Points”

The paper is focused on the problems of continuous education in Russia that is playing a growing role while the country is moving towards innovative economy. The continuous education may be implemented in various forms, from university and online courses to companies-based supplementary post-graduate education. The study is based on the results of a survey conducted among 80 experts that represent stakeholders in the Russian innovation system. The interviews were conducted in 2016–2017 in 12 regions of Russia with experts, employed in federal and regional administrations, venture and investment funds, institutes for development, technology parks, incubators, paten offices, private companies, universities, and research institutes. The survey was centered on such questions as whether the current state of higher education satisfies the needs of innovative, science intensive industries; on the role of corporate education; on how the special professional education is evolving and what are the major barriers for its development. The survey has demonstrated that higher education institutes are rather passive in terms of initiating new educational techniques; the gap between needs of science-based industries and quality of university graduates is still big. Moreover, higher education institutes are losing in competition with new, mostly digital, forms of education that the open market is suggesting. Corporate education in its current form is mostly affordable for large state companies while small and medium-size enterprises are looking for intermediaries at the market that may help them to identify and train new workforce.

Geography of doctoral education in The Netherlands: Origin and current work location of recent PhDs from five Dutch universities

Human capital is indispensable for regional innovation and economic growth, and PhD graduates (PhDs) play an important role in these processes. This is the first study describing the geographic origin and current work location of PhDs from Dutch universities, which are located in a densely populated area with a high concentration of basic science and science-based industries. Our study shows that their country of origin is strongly related to the field of study, as engineering PhDs were born outside The Netherlands much more often than PhDs from other fields. Furthermore, we show that PhDs disproportionally come from the same region as where the PhD university is located. PhDs also frequently did their pre-PhD degree at the university where they obtained their PhD degree. Finally, a disproportionate number of PhDs stay in the PhD region to work, especially if they also did their pre-PhD degrees at the PhD university. The extent of PhDs staying in the PhD region varies by sector, with PhDs in the higher education sector staying in the PhD region more often than PhDs working in other sectors. This implies that the geographic concentration of PhDs in the region of the PhD university is mainly due to PhDs staying to work at the same university rather than employment opportunities in other (science-based) industries—a finding at odds with Dutch science policy, which promotes mobility in academia but also stresses the importance of the region in innovation by science-based industries.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF OPEN INNOVATION: DO SIZE AND PERFORMANCE OF OPEN INNOVATION GROUPS MATTER?

Innovation is accelerated by heterogeneous knowledge, which is obtained in open innovation. We investigate whether there are limits to the beneficial degree of openness. Conceiving innovator group size as a trade-off between knowledge heterogeneity and coordination costs for innovating groups, we theorise about the impact of group size on innovative performance. We hypothesise that openness and internationalisation positively moderate this relationship, but that the positive effects are limited by the trade-off between knowledge heterogeneity and coordination costs. Through an empirical investigation using a large set of international patent data, we find support for our conceptual development and are able to conclude how many individuals those groups contain that generate the most innovative performance. Groups of three inventors have the most positive impact, and groups of two to eight inventors also generate positive effects. Science-based industries however allow for bigger groups than other industries, and supplier-dominated industries have smaller beneficial group sizes.

What triggers innovation diffusion? Intermediary organizations and geography in cultural and science-based industries

This paper argues that innovation diffusion is not a rational implementation process, but more accurately portrayed as a highly social process, involving sets of intermediate organizations that contribute to a product’s reputation. Empirically it builds on two case studies, one cultural and one science-based, to demonstrate there are industry differences in where innovations get validated: validating intermediaries are centralized in few global nodes in the case of theatre, and decentralized in each marketplace in the case of pharmaceutical vaccines. This pattern is counterintuitive, because it is different from what we would expect based on the spatial organization of their production activities. These findings have implications for policy: can we assume innovations will readily diffuse (and export) outside their region of origin?

Prior-Learning, Cumulative Science Experiences and the Absorptive Capacity of Bio-Entrepreneurs: A Case of the East Midlands Region, England

<p>In the modern healthcare and medical sectors corporate bio-pharmaceutical firms continue to scale down their in-house research and development (R&D) activities in favour of outsourcing the services to bio-tech ventures. These small but, entrepreneurial research-oriented organisations have increased dramatically. They are predominantly owned by bio-entrepreneurs who are extensively experienced scientists. In the science-based industry they operate in, innovation “ecosystems” consisting of global business and social networks are a common feature. As such, they have to consistently exploit them to complement the knowledge gaps in their enterprises. In that context, the paper sets out to investigate five bio-entrepreneurs currently active in biotechnology within the East Midlands region in England. It particularly examines the role performed by their prior-learning and their cumulative science experiences in recognising, assimilating and productively applying science-related knowledge acquired in their innovation “ecosystems”.</p>