Research Policy最新文献

In the attempt to boost innovation, policy-makers have enacted a myriad of programs targeting innovative start-ups in recent years. Empirical evidence on these initiatives has almost exclusively focused on national-level programs, overlooking those implemented at the local level. This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence on the joint effects of local policies focusing on Italy, where regional governments have been very active in providing financial support to these firms. By leveraging discontinuities in program design, we adopt a local randomization approach and document a null effect of these programs over a wide range of firm-level outcomes. However, we find that securing local subsidies increases start-ups’ probability to obtain additional public subsidies, which points in the direction of a vicious “Matthew effect” in subsidy allocation. Consistent with both reputation and learning mechanisms, the increase in follow-on subsidies occurs for funds disbursed at the local level only, whereas no effect is detected for subsidies allocated by national or international authorities.

Climate change increasingly affects businesses in many ways. This paper analyses the link between the way and extent a firm faces economic consequences of climate change on the one hand, and the firm's innovation activities on the other. We investigate whether climate change affectedness leads to more innovations that reduce negative environmental impacts (‘eco-innovations’), and whether other innovation activities are crowded-out by more eco-innovation (with potential adverse effects on technical progress and productivity). We use a novel data source from the Community Innovation Survey 2020 which distinguishes four mechanisms how climate change may affect firms: new government regulation, changes in demand, higher production cost, and disruption from extreme weather events. Based on data from the German CIS 2020, probit and treatment effect models show that climate change affectedness is positively linked to eco-innovations. For other innovation activities we also find positive, albeit lower effects, suggesting that there is no crowding-out of non-eco-innovations due to the economic consequences of climate change.

Focusing on inter-regional mobility, this paper explores the relationship between the inflow of highly skilled workers and the production of technological novelty, measured as the occurrence of new combinations of technology subclasses. Based on French workers' occupational mobility and patent data, we build an aggregated sample at the level of 22 French regions over the period 1996–2017. We find that workers coming from regions specialized in a given technology subclass drive technological novelty in the same subclass at destination. This effect is present only for subclasses related to the local technological portfolio at destination and is both present for reuse and creation-type novelties. Results imply that local absorptive capacity and a complementarity between internal dynamics and exogenous drivers are important for regions to upgrade their technological space.

The diffusion of radical technologies poses a significant challenge for firms. While existing studies have mainly concentrated on organizing for radical innovation, less attention has been given to strategies that enable firms to bring these technologies to the product market. In this paper, we argue that servitization – the addition of product-related services to tangible product offerings – can serve as a potential solution, largely due to its ability to reduce customer uncertainty about the nature and utilization of radical technologies and offset adoption costs. However, there are limits to deploying this strategy: developing and implementing service-generating capabilities, together with maintaining and advancing the capability to generate radical technologies, can be costly and risky. Our analysis of 505 top corporate R&D investors from the U.S. manufacturing industry confirms a significant relationship between technological radicalness and servitization, but it is nuanced and depends on the level of financial resources available to firms, known as financial resource slack. More specifically, firms with higher slack have a greater extent of servitization activities when their technologies are more radical. In turn, firms with lower slack have a greater extent of servitization activities when their technologies fall within the middle range of the radicalness spectrum. We use these findings to draw implications for practice and policy.

How does technological interdependence affect innovation? We address this question by examining the influence of neighbors’ innovativeness and the structure of the innovators’ network on a sector’s capacity to develop new technologies. We study these two dimensions of technological interdependence by applying novel methods of text mining and network analysis to the documents of 6.5 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) between 1976 and 2021. We find that, in the long run, the influence of network linkages is as important as that of neighbor innovativeness. In the short run, however, positive shocks to neighbor innovativeness yield relatively rapid effects, while the impact of shocks strengthening network linkages manifests with delay, even though lasts longer. Our analysis also highlights that patent text contains a wealth of information often not captured by traditional innovation metrics, such as patent citations.

This article is devoted to the question of innovation in libraries. Ignored by ‘service studies’, this question occupies an important place in library and information science, but is all too often approached in a way that is factual and descriptive. Drawing on advances in service economics and management, this article adopts a perspective of the library as an ‘architectural’ or ‘assembled’ service bringing together a number of core and peripheral services, and mobilizing competences and different types of technology to collaboratively generate, utilities for the user or community. We discuss how such a representation of the product can systematically account for the full complexity of the forms and dynamics of innovation in libraries. We have thus identified and empirically illustrated three general innovation logics (horizontal, vertical and diagonal), which differ according to the components of the library service on which they act, and which operate according to different modalities, reflecting different innovation trajectories.

We draw from resource orchestration and socioemotional wealth (SEW) arguments to examine radical innovation in multifamily firms. We theorize that the weak coordination mechanism associated with multifamily ownership has a negative effect on the positive SEW-radical innovation relationship. Additionally, we argue that low generational involvement – the number of family generations involved simultaneously in the family firm's top management team – mitigates the negative moderating effect of multifamily ownership. Low generational involvement is a mobilizing mechanism that ensures that the family firm uses its SEW to produce radical innovation. We use a sample of Spanish firms to test our expectations. Our results show that firms realize the positive effect of SEW on radical innovation in concert with the leadership governance mechanism of multifamily ownership and low generational involvement. These results are important in that evidence suggests that radical innovation plays a strong role in family firms' long-term survival, success, and renewal. We conclude our paper with a discussion of the study's theoretical contributions and opportunities for future research.

Understanding what impedes and facilitates radical innovation is crucial. This study introduces a process perspective on managerial cognition into the strategic leadership literature to elucidate the dynamics that contribute to idea erosion during the development of radical innovation. Employing a framing perspective and utilizing longitudinal data from a single case, this study presents a process model of strategic leaders' framing-induced idea erosion. At the heart of this process are two dynamics. First is a dynamic consisting of the anticipation of innovation that fails to account for the necessary iterative process, leading to a growing mismatch between expectations and activities. Second is a dynamic consisting of cognitive processes, where strategic leaders frame this mismatch as a failure, this intensifying over time. This study shows that strategic leaders tend to favor incremental over radical innovation, not due to a shortage of ideas but because they frame their activities as failures.

Early career researchers' transition to independence in academia is critical. Funding bodies across the world have established early career schemes specifically for researchers who are looking to lead on their first independent project, transitioning from postdoctoral researchers to principal investigators. We interviewed 51 individuals who had received an early career fellowship or award from the Medical Research Council in the UK and conducted 18 focused groups with 95 fellows using a novel tool to facilitate the discussion. Using a systems theory approach, we show that in the process of becoming independent, early career researchers often fall between the cracks of a system that fails to treat them as independent, they are not clear about career pathways in research, and they receive conflicting information about their career progression. More than individual influences, such as motivation for research and gender, contextual factors, such as funding support, institutional commitment and wider political factors influence the career progression of individuals. Early career researchers do not always feel they have the level of institutional support they expected. These findings highlight structural challenges that early career researchers face when transitioning to independence and suggest there is still ground to be covered to meet the commitment universities and research institutions to support the career development of researchers. The challenges identified are not unique to the UK context and can inform funding policies across the word.

Do women directors make firms more risk-averse or more innovative? We examine this question by predicting and showing that the effect of increasing women directors on the board on firm innovation output depends on the firm's performance relative to aspirations (PRA). Research based on the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF) has shown that the behavioral motives of firms to innovate depend on the firm's PRA, both positive and negative. However, who is interpreting the information that performance feedback provides could make a difference in PRA's effect. In contrast to traditional BTOF predictions, we theorize that, when performance is poor relative to aspirations and when the firm is close to failure, boards with more women directors will result in firms focusing more on survival, reducing innovation output. In contrast, when performance is high relative to aspirations and when the firm has increasing available slack, boards with more women will result in the firm taking advantage of the excess leeway that this provides, increasing innovation output. Using a panel dataset of patent data with 6118 observations for 524 firms from 1999 to 2016, we find strong empirical support for most of our predictions. Also, post hoc analyses show that for radical innovation (i.e., patents with citations in the top decile) the effect on risk-aversion is more prominent than the effect on innovation output.