Technovation最新文献

This study addresses the transformative impacts of the digital economy, which forges connections throughout Research & Development (R&D) networks, prompting leaders of forward-thinking organizations to predict market shifts, guided by the frameworks of institutional theory and resource dependence theory. Institutional theory highlights the pressures, both coercive and normative, arising from the digital economy and regulatory environments, whereas resource dependence theory elucidates the strategic approaches organizations adopt to acquire vital resources and minimize network dependencies. This innovative research investigates how an organization's orientation towards the digital economy affects its role within R&D networks, leveraging insights from both theoretical standpoints. By pinpointing technology transformation and legal environment as key moderators, this study assesses their moderating effects. The analysis utilizes a comprehensive dataset containing 141,118 patents spanning from 1995 to 2018, concentrating on R&D efforts within China's strategic emerging sectors. The outcomes show that an organization's digital economy orientation, shaped by institutional norms and resource interdependencies, positively influences its network centrality but negatively impacts its structural hole position. Additionally, technology transformation and the legal environment, as institutional mechanisms, negatively modulate the relationship between digital economy orientation and network centrality, but positively influence the structural hole relationship. The study concludes with a bibliometric analysis to situate our findings within existing literature and discusses the theoretical and practical implications, rooted in institutional and resource dependence theories.

How do international venture capital (IVC)-invested ventures (IIVs) between the U.S. and China generate new knowledge differently and follow distinct growth trajectories? Given that venture capital (VC) is critical for financing frontier innovations among new ventures, comparing U.S. and Chinese IIVs is essential for informing national innovation policy. Based on the organizational ecology perspective, we propose that U.S. and Chinese new ventures have divergent trajectories in frontier innovations. We identify 1782 first-round IVC investments in U.S. and Chinese new ventures operating in the computer software, e-commerce, biotechnology, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence sectors between 2010 and 2020 along with their 2825 patents (317 Chinese patents and 2508 U.S. patents). Our findings indicate that Chinese IIVs exhibit greater variation in terms of technological distance, search scope, and knowledge coupling, compared to U.S. IIVs. However, Chinese IIVs’ frontier innovations have more divergent technological trajectories and attract fewer followers than U.S. IIVs, based on patent citations. In a firm-level analysis, we find that Chinese IIVs are less likely to receive a subsequent financing round. Further, IIVs with greater technological distance and search scope, and with higher impact patents, have more opportunities to receive the next round of funding.

The global transition to clean energy requires policies to support innovation in the energy sector. However, the stability of energy policies is vulnerable to political disruptions and policy reversals. This paper aims to understand how innovation systems respond to periods of political instability. Specifically, it investigates the impact of policy retrenchment under Mexico's President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on the sectoral innovation system (SIS) for renewable energy. Employing the innovation system framework, we examine how the structure and functions of the SIS were affected by political changes under the AMLO Administration. Notable policy changes include canceling long-term auctions and strategic transmission projects, reducing science funding, and fostering uncertainty. These alterations significantly impact entrepreneurial experimentation, knowledge development, market formation, guidance of the search, resource mobilization, and the creation of legitimacy in the SIS for wind and solar technologies. On the positive side, we find that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local governments took action to compensate for the lack of federal leadership, and distributed generation continued as a niche of innovation. This research contributes to the innovation literature with an empirical study of innovation systems in Mexico. More generally, it highlights the adaptability of innovation systems during political transitions.

As competition intensifies, business incubators face conflicting pressures: the need to conform to market prototypes to gain legitimacy while also differentiating themselves from peers to avoid competition. Optimal distinctiveness (OD) theory explores how organizations manage this pressure to gain legitimacy and achieve superior performance. This study introduces a hierarchy-of-needs perspective to categorize the services provided by incubators into two dimensions: generic service market infrastructure development (MID) addressing basic incubatee needs, and customized service business capability development (BCD) catering to specific needs. We empirically investigate how new private incubators in China strategically position themselves along these dimensions to pursue OD. Furthermore, we discuss the configurational effects of MID and BCD distinctiveness, alongside contextual conditions, identifying four paths to achieving high performance. These findings offer fresh insights into the orchestration view of OD by developing a new categorization of strategic dimensions from a hierarchy-of-needs perspective, as well as elucidating their individual effects and contextual contingencies.

Complexities in external knowledge evaluation present significant “limits” to open innovation (OI), challenging decision making in the processes of searching, accessing, and using external knowledge for recombination, which are central to the OI paradigm. Grounded in the theory of attitudes, this study investigates the role of standardization in preventing the negative behavioral influence of “not invented here” (NIH) and “not-shared-here” (NSH) attitudes on knowledge search and sourcing decisions by debiasing decisional paths associated with reluctance to adopt OI. Using hurdle model estimations on 600 small-and medium-sized enterprises, the results of the study reveal that NIH and NSH attitudes are the origin of decision-making biases at different stages of OI implementation, where external knowledge is the focus of evaluation. Proactive standardization efforts are shown to be effective in countering the impact of NIH and NSH attitudes on knowledge sourcing decisions and on the intensity of knowledge sourcing, typically leading to bounded search, inward decisions, and anticipated termination of projects. This study provides insights into the influence of standardization efforts specifically addressing challenges related to the evaluation of external knowledge, where the likelihood of failure is higher and associated costs are significant.

New processes significantly affect firms and workers; however, due to a lack of quantitative metrics, our understanding of the measures, determinants, and impacts of new processes remains limited. Drawing on unique data from Pakistan, we analyze five different metrics of process innovation output: cost reduction, defect rate reduction, reduction in production cycle time, increase in production capacity, and improvement in product quality. We find that the breadth and depth of innovative capabilities, level of competition, and availability of market sources of knowledge are important inducers of process innovation, and that smaller firms are more likely to introduce new processes and are better able to transform them into higher output. All five process innovation outputs are associated with higher labor productivity and sales expansion; however, there is considerable heterogeneity in the size of these impacts. We did not find that adopting new processes led to lower employment.

This paper explores the creation and development process of an accelerator by a European business university, investigating the factors that led the university to found its own accelerator and that guided its set up process in terms of choice of focal activities and governance structure, as well as the mechanisms through which it creates value for its internal and external ecosystem. Relying on an in-depth case study approach, we conducted several interviews with members of the accelerator, key university stakeholders, and external partners. Our empirical evidence points to the existence of both internal and external drivers that led to the emergence of the university accelerator and suggests that its operating and governance structures were strategically designed to leverage the university’s internal strengths and resources and to balance integration and autonomy needs. It also underscores the key roles played by the top management of the university and by the internal champion in aligning views, building consensus, and negotiating solutions in this process. Finally, it reveals how by strategically orchestrating the relationships with internal and external stakeholders a university accelerator can build internal and external legitimacy and successfully balance the need of creating value for both the university and the broader ecosystem in which it operates.

This study explores how knowledge ecosystems (KEs) led by a knowledge broker (KB) can support the digital transformation of Micro-, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs). By employing an exploratory research design and action research methodology, the paper proposes and applies an analytical framework to investigate the characteristics of KEs and the knowledge managed by the KB as the innovation intermediary acting as leader of the KE The case study selected uncovers the dimensions of a regional KE guided by a digital innovation hub (DIH) supporting MSMEs towards the adoption of the “Digital Artisan platform” deriving from an Industry 4.0 project.

The findings highlight the importance of trust, strategic alignment, and dynamic capabilities of KBs in enhancing MSMEs' digital journey and emphasize the location dimension of the regional KE as a means for providing tailored support. This research contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of regional KEs enabling the digital transformation through KBs who are the innovation intermediaries covering the role of leaders of the ecosystem.

The impact of digital transformation (DT) on open innovation (OI) has attracted growing interest. However, the nuanced effects of various forms of coupled OI on innovation outcomes remain underexplored. This study aims to investigate the differential impacts of coupled OI modes on innovation performance within the context of DT driven by Industry 4.0 technologies. To test the hypotheses, we used Heckman's two-stage estimation utilizing the Korean Innovation Survey 2022. The findings reveal that collaborative activities as coupled OI modes positively impact innovation performance. Furthermore, the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies amplifies the positive impact of research and development (R&D) collaborations on business process innovation while diminishing the positive effect of non-R&D collaborations on new product development. This study's contribution to the literature lies in its finding that the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies can only be beneficial to firms when DT guides the focal firm on being more cooperative in R&D collaboration activities and therefore helps focal firms to use innovation opportunities efficiently and more rapidly and to innovate diverse business processes. In practice, a firm should have sufficient capabilities to rigorously analyze DT-adoption data to capture market needs.

Technologically illiterate users are frequently excluded from access to technology and its benefits, creating a digital divide. Some groups of older adults are among those considered technologically illiterate and experiencing vulnerability. For this population, traditional technologies that require physical interactions have proven to be stressful and create a phenomenon known as ‘technophobia’. Herein lies the potential value of touchless technologies such as voice assistants, which may offer a new avenue for older adult inclusion. Thus, our study delves deep into the lifeworld of older people to understand how voice assistants can impact inclusion and well-being. Adopting a longitudinal approach, we observed and interviewed participants (n = 32) in their homes, augmenting this qualitative data with secondary data from voice assistant device reports. Our initial results show that older people perceived the effect of illiteracy in their first encounter with the technology, but over time, they learnt to overcome initial challenges and started building relationships with artificial intelligence. In the final part of the study, participants identified the value of using technology and recognised that technology ‘is not the boogeyman’ but rather enables tech-inclusion and well-being. Under the lens of transformative service research, we provide a framework that illustrates how artificial intelligence is healing older people's digital divide, showing core elements of inclusion (access to new technology, support with activities, sense of participation, independence, convenience and source of information), and well-being (sense of pride, entertainment option, eased loneliness, improved self-esteem).