Research Policy最新文献

Innovation is cumulative in nature, and follow-on innovation is a way to extract value from existing technology. Thus, to appropriate the value of standard essential patents (SEPs), firms need to win the first race in pushing proprietary technologies to become SEPs and the second race in exploiting SEP-related opportunities in follow-on innovations. This study investigates how, when, and to what effect firms strategically maneuver in follow-on innovations to maximize the value appropriation from SEPs. Drawing from a resource-based logic, we argue that SEP firms’ winning strategic maneuver involves such moves: (a) engaging in early follow-on innovation targeting SEPs, (b) prioritizing the exploitation of SEPs over non-SEPs, and (c) exploiting cross-follow-on innovations to take advantage of the information and network resources they obtain from their participation in the standardization process. We further argue that SEP firms’ strategic maneuvering results in high-quality follow-on innovations, which together with SEPs form stronger patent portfolios. Analyzing a unique dataset of patents from leading Chinese ICT firms matched with forward citations, we find empirical evidence that supports our arguments. Our research has important theoretical and managerial implications for firms’ strategic innovation management with a focus on technology standardization.

Analyzing data from two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 382 entrepreneurs, this study explores the implications of training a group of entrepreneurs in a scientific approach to decision-making on their project selection. It provides evidence that the documented increased likelihood of project termination by ‘scientific’ entrepreneurs is associated with higher accuracy in recognizing project value. Unlike the control group, they are quicker in adjusting their expectations on project value downward before making the termination decision. This study also fills an important gap in prior research by exploring the longer-term implications (up to five years after the training began) of a scientific approach. It shows that, over the longer term, the initial discrepancy in termination rates between treated and control entrepreneurs levels out, with the control group eventually exhibiting a higher rate of project termination. Scientific entrepreneurs generate a higher number of new ideas, and a higher proportion of their projects culminate in the launch of a venture. Overall, these findings support the notion that scientific entrepreneurs are not excessively critical in their project assessments; rather, by terminating lower-potential projects earlier, they can free up resources for redeployment elsewhere.

Firms rely on coopetition strategies (i.e., alliances with competitors), which combine cooperative and competitive behaviors to yield higher innovation outcomes. To allow for these combinations, seminal research on coopetition has considered competition and cooperation independent dimensions. However, recent contributions have suggested that they are interdependent constructs that can be either positively (balance view) or negatively (tension view) related. We claim that these two views are complementary, and that the degree of competition has an inverted U-shaped relationship (i.e., both positive and negative) with the degree of cooperation. Distinguishing between “current competition” and “proximity of future competition” and based on a sample of 180 coopetitive projects involving innovation and R&D in the biopharma industry, we show how current competition and the proximity of future competition impact the degree of cooperation in coopetitive projects. Specifically, we demonstrate the role of the proximity of future competition in directly reducing the degree of cooperation and moderating the impact of current competition on cooperation.

We investigate the unexplored relationship between robot technology adoption and product innovation. We exploit Spanish firm-level data on robot adoption and use a staggered timing difference-in-differences, supported by an instrumental variable approach. Instead of an enabling effect, we find a negative association between robot adoption and the probability to introduce product innovations, as well as their number. The result is particularly significant for larger, established, and non-high-tech firms. In line with industry evolution models, we rationalise and interpret the findings suggesting that a key mechanism at work in the robotisation-innovation nexus are diseconomies of scope fuelled by capacity-increasing investments. We also discuss whether industrial robots in our data feature enabling capabilities at all. Our results have important implications for understanding the role of robots in firms' operations and strategies, as well as for policy design.

The scale of the potential implications of machine learning (ML) has prompted discussions on the issues of corporate control and technological openness. However, how commercial and non-commercially oriented organisations each contribute to ML progress remains an open question. This study uses the recombinant innovation perspective as a lens to explore recombinant patterns across projects in an open source software (OSS) environment – where a great deal of ML innovation occurs – and assess how commercial orientation influences such patterns. It builds on a unique dataset containing data on 28,443 OSS projects, their code dependencies and the organisations owning them. Exploratory analyses reveal that ML projects combine larger and more diverse components, and produce more atypical combinations in shorter timeframes than other OSS projects, and that both company and non-company owned ML projects contribute to such recombinant atypicality. Regression analyses indicate that company owned ML projects tend to rely more on distant combinations of technical knowledge, whereas non-company owned ML projects tend to produce more novel combinations of application ideas. By extending the theories of recombinant innovation and motivation in OS innovation into a new setting – ML technology, this study contributes to both literatures by confirming that the link between distant recombination and innovation still holds in contexts characterised by complex search spaces, and by suggesting complementarities between commercial and non-commercial orientations in OSS environments rich in knowledge diversity and recombinant activity.

Economic theories have shown that industrial policy's effectiveness in fostering innovation hinges on its ability to address market failures, stimulate creative destruction, and avert adverse foreign reactions. Conversely, distortions induced by the policy and foreign countermeasures can impede its success. In this paper, we use information extracted from Chinese listed firms' financial reports and a difference-in-differences approach to examine how the “Made in China 2025” policy initiative has impacted firms' innovation and productivity outcomes. Our findings reveal that while targeted firms by the policy seem to receive increased innovation subsidies and display some indications of a heightened R&D/sales ratio, statistically significant improvements in patenting and productivity are lacking. These results cast doubt on the efficacy of the “Made in China 2025” initiative in achieving its intended goal of promoting the innovation capability of targeted firms, highlighting the theoretical and practical complexities of innovation-focused industrial policies.

We examine the change in status of three Swedish colleges to universities in 1999. This change greatly expanded the inflow of resources in the form of basic funding to the new universities. Using detailed individual data, we follow the careers of staff employed before 1999 at the treated institutions, examining their scientific performance, promotion, affiliation, and coauthorship behavior after the transition to university and comparing them to that of matched sample researchers at control colleges in a difference-in-differences analysis. We find an 89 percent increase in publication by publishing academics, an effect driven by increased funding. But we do not find an increased likelihood of publishing. Publication activity is concentrated among men, those working in technical sciences, and those holding research positions. The change to a university also led to a shift toward research-enhancing practices and organizations, manifested in coauthorship patterns, affiliations, and workforce composition. These changes altogether, enabled the new universities to begin converging in terms of research productivity to the level of established universities. Our results indicate that additional resources to institutions that historically received insufficient investment unlocked the research potential of aspiring researchers.

Despite growing calls for a greater internationalization of management research, the discipline still struggles with the challenge of integrating diverse national contexts. While recent decades have seen a change toward a more equitable treatment of all national contexts, the belief that research conducted outside the United States is less generalizable remains strong. In this research note, we explore the general perceptions of what is considered a “typical” study context by associating them with authors' variable tendencies to report threats to external validity. Using a sample of 400 papers from seven top-tier management journals, we find that research based on non-US data tends to report more external validity threats, which makes it appear less generalizable. While the belief that the US constitutes a “typical” study context is shared by both US and non-US author teams, non-US co-authors tend to exhibit a relatively stronger bias against the generalizability of non-US samples in their studies. Collectively, our results contribute to the literature on external validity threats, generalizability, and biases in peer review, while also responding to recent calls for a more diverse and inclusive management research program.

Incumbent firms utilize corporate venture capital (CVC) as a vehicle to enhance their innovative performance. Still, little is known about the central individual in this context: the CVC unit head, who acts as a knowledge broker between portfolio ventures and the parent organization. We combine human capital theory with the attention-based view to investigate the effects of various facets of CVC unit heads' experience on parent firms' innovative inputs in the form of explorative and exploitative patenting and innovative outputs, specifically market and technological breakthrough innovation. Drawing on a dataset of U.S.-listed firms with CVC units, our findings contribute to the CVC literature in three ways. First, we introduce CVC unit heads' career experiences as new individual-level antecedents of parent firms' innovative performance. Second, we enhance the understanding of the CVC-core paradox, which is the tension between exploration and exploitation in the parent firm. Finally, by employing a combination of patents and new product introductions as metrics for innovative performance, we bridge the gap between learning and innovation in extant CVC research, demonstrating that the effects of CVC unit heads include customer-facing outcomes.

Does ethnolinguistic diversity prevent policy adoption? The implementation of the Italian Start-up Act of 2012 in the bilingual (German and Italian) region of Trentino-Alto Adige offers the ideal setting to investigate this question. The Act sets up a scheme of benefits which young firms can access by registering as “innovative start-ups” on a voluntary basis. We find that policy take-up has been persistently lower in areas of the region with more German speakers, as local firms with German-named administrators are less likely to register as start-ups than firms with Italian-named ones. These findings are robust to firm characteristics and regional heterogeneity and are also visible within mixed-language municipalities. Furthermore, text analysis on press sources suggests that this national policy was much more extensively covered in the Italian-language local media, while a survey of local residents indicates that German speakers have lower knowledge of national policies unless they are embedded in multilingual networks.