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This paper provides a critical review of firm-level innovation models based on research in the industrially advanced countries (IACs) and draws implications for firms in industrialising countries such as Korea and Taiwan. The paper summarises different categories of innovation model and identifies their achievements and weaknesses, showing how a few researchers have successfully linked IAC models to innovation processes found within the more advanced developing nations such as Korea. One of the chief contributions of IAC models is that many of them go substantially into the management of innovation and the decision-making processes within the firm. However, in general, there is a lack of empirical evidence to verify existing models, weak theoretical underpinnings and, in some cases, a failure to sufficiently recognise the diversity and unpredictability of innovation processes. The paper suggests how best to use innovation models and how to overcome some of the difficulties in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A variety of countries have instituted market liberalisation to develop their economies in the footsteps of more developed countries and changes in market system significantly influence a firm's behaviour and performance. This paper investigates the impact of market liberalisation on a firm's strategy of technology exploration in South Korea. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between market liberalisation and technology exploration. In addition, we find that financial slack and industry concentration negatively moderate the curvilinear relationship between market liberalisation and technology exploration, while business group positively moderates this relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a broad level, it has been shown that different institutional contexts, policy regimes and business systems affect the kinds of activities in which a nation specialises. This paper is concerned with the way in which different national business systems affect the nature of participation of a nation in the knowledge economy. The paper seeks to explain cross-national variations in the knowledge economy in the Australia, Denmark and Sweden with reference to dominant characteristics of the business system. Although Australia, Denmark and Sweden are all small wealthy countries, they each have quite distinctive business systems. Australia has been regarded as a variant of the competitive business system and has generally been described as an entrepreneurial economy with a large small firm population. In contrast Sweden has a coordinated business system that has favoured large industrial firms. The Danish variant of the coordinated model, with its well-developed vocational training system, is distinguishable by its large population of networked small and medium size enterprises. The three countries also differ significantly on two dimensions of participation in the knowledge economy. First, there is cross-national variation in patterns of specialisation in knowledge intensive industries and services. Second, the institutional infrastructure of the knowledge economy (or the existing stock of knowledge and competence in the economy, the potential for generation and diffusion of new knowledge and the capacity for commercialisation of new ideas) differs across the three countries. This paper seeks to explain variations in these two dimensions of the knowledge economy with reference to characteristics of the business system in the three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to find the differences between national and international relationships in Iran and Switzerland's Nanoscience research between 2008–2015. The results show significant differences some of which are attributed to the general dichotomy of developed-developing countries like stronger University-Industry-Government relations in Switzerland; but others are not, especially those pertaining to bilateral relations. In summary, the Government-Industry relations in Switzerland are generally closer in this field because the emerging characteristics of Nanoscience call for more state intervention, even in the context of developed countries. Greater Government-University relations in Iran can be explained by referring to the structure of national innovation system of this country. However, the no significant differences between University-Industry relations result needs further research so that it may in turn lead to improvements of the triple-helix calculations. Lastly, some theoretical implications and further research directions are suggested at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question addressed in this paper is whether and how intermediate developed countries (IDCs) can profit from the possibilities opened by globalisation to set off processes of capability building in advanced technological sectors. While most debates have taken place in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) field, the paper addresses the case of biotechnology. It is argued that, given the specific characteristics of biotechnology, opportunities may emerge for technology-intensive entrepreneurial initiatives in countries that have developed a reasonable science base and built the capacity to connect to and plug into international biotechnology networks. The exploitation of these opportunities requires strategies that combine good indigenous scientific competences and a pool of skilled human resources, with transnational linkages, and that rely on firms' abilities to find a position in globally coordinated 'knowledge value chains'. The paper conducts a first assessment of the viability of this approach, drawing on empirical research on 'distant networking strategies' adopted by Portuguese new biotechnology firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study portrays an overview of the Technology Analysis & Strategic Management (TASM) Journal over the last 31 years. The work examines a broad range of performance aspects of the journal, such as citations and publications' structure, most cited documents, most productive authors, countries, and universities. Besides, this study also presents the visualisation of co-citation, the bibliographic coupling of countries, co-citation, and co-occurrence of the most commonly used keywords. The results show a gradual increase in the number of citations and published documents, and this trend is expected to remain eulogised in the coming years. Results also predict that the developed countries are on top in terms of contribution to TASM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the impact of different cooperation networks upon their cooperative innovation effect (CIE) and innovation performance, and examined the relationship between the CIE and the innovation performance of firms. Some interesting findings appear. First, the findings indicate that there are significant and positive relationships between the seven cooperation networks and the CIE of firms, of which the internal cooperation network has the most significant and positive impact on their CIE. Second, the findings also reveal that there are significant and positive relationships between the six cooperation networks, except firm–government cooperation (FGC) and the innovation performance of firms. Third, contrary to some studies from developed countries, the results reveal that FGC does not demonstrate any significant impact on the innovation performance of firms. These results enrich and supplement the current understanding of the relationships between cooperation networks and innovation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws upon a survey of the life science and biotechnology regions of Oxford, Central Scotland and South West England to examine the innovation and embeddedness traits of the regions. The insights into the compositional weaknesses and strengths of the regions suggest opportunities and threats for the future development of the UK's life sciences and biotechnology. The discussion moves forward debates on biotechnology, regional innovation, regional economic development and policy by posing research questions relating to the gap of knowledge of two under-researched regions, the need for a differentiated view of regions and a public policy approach tailored towards them, as well as the prospects of 'engineering' high-tech regions. Some of the highlighted policy challenges are common to the three regions, while others are region-specific and reflect the variations of regional make-up and stage of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies provide latecomer manufacturers with technological catch-up opportunities in emerging field of intelligent manufacturing (IM). Prior studies on IM mainly focused on firms from developed countries or digitally-savvy firms. However, latecomer firms that have inadequate resources should identify and leverage diverse digital-related resources to achieve digital catch-up in IM, and the research on their digital catch-up remains limited. Resource orchestration is a sound guiding theory that we adopt to examine this phenomenon. This study conducts an in-depth case study of the successful catch-up of a role-model firm in China and reveals a three-phase process model for the digital catch-up of latecomers in IM. Our findings contribute to existing literature on IM fields, latecomers' catch-up phenomena, resource orchestration theory, as well as knowledge of technology analysis and strategic management. The model also can be practical guidance for latecomers to achieve digital catch-up step by step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerating the pace of energy technological innovation is essential to curb global climate change and build a clean energy system. Based on this idea, from the perspective of renewable energy technology gaps across countries, this study presents a thorough empirical analysis of the convergence of energy technology research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) budgets across OECD countries over 1985–2017. In doing so, we apply two-regimes threshold autoregressive approach to account for heterogeneity, nonlinearity, and transition path in energy technology RD&D convergence. One observation is that only a small number of advanced countries namely Canada, Japan, and the U.S. follow a nonlinear process and exhibit partial convergence in energy technology RD&D budgets with Japan as a transition country. Interestingly, our results also provide clear support for the global convergence of energy technology RD&D budgets once accounting for the two regimes jointly. These trends in national energy innovation policies could arguably help Canada, Japan, and the U.S. to drive up their energy RD&D trajectory into the future, suggesting that these countries would be able to achieve a more sustainable energy innovation supply system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermediaries were once considered to be a product of a market economy, however, in some statist industrial countries, the top-down national innovation system limited the 'redundancy' in regions (cf. Leydesdorff 2018), and the local governments have to establish intermediaries to strengthen the regional knowledge base. An innovation intermediary established by a local government is an initiator of regional collaboration and a collaboration of triple helix spaces in itself. In this study, we consider public innovation intermediaries (PIINs) as hybrid innovation agents with an institutional design at the meso level and examine the role of PIINs played in regional innovation from the framework of triple helix spaces. To render the virtual spaces qualitative, we construct a framework of activity-functions-spaces (AFS) and analyse the innovation activities of PIINs. Through the comparison of two PIINs in Japan, we find the asymmetric relationship between the triple helix spaces in PIINs and the regional triple helix, and the differentiated but intersected spaces in PIINs are most conducive to regional innovation, which provides insights for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on standards battles primarily focus on battles that occur in developed economies. In this research we focus on standards battles in China. In particular, we analyse two cases in which, in China, two competing domestic standards were developed in response to international standards but where the domestic standards do not get diffused in the international and domestic arena. Although the government plays a significant role in developing China's economy, we show that her strong hand does not easily promote a chosen standard into market dominance. By studying these cases of standards battles we open up the black box of the government and identify inconsistencies and competition within the government that lower overall commitment to enforce a strong standardisation policy of the Chinese government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy makers have increasingly recognised the role which universities can play in economic growth in recent years. One consequence of this has been a dramatic growth in university research management systems in developed countries. The lack of such systems in African universities threatens to further widen their relative disadvantage in securing and managing external funding. Recent surveys demonstrate growing awareness of this among the universities themselves, and that support has been received from a range of international donors to address the problem. This, however, has not yet succeeded in the creation of sustainable long-term structures at institutional level. A more coherent approach to the problem will be required over the next decade, and a framework is suggested to guide this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]