Guannan Xu

Accelerating Secondary Innovation through Organizational Learning: A Case Study and Theoretical Analysis

On the basis of nearly 20 years of in-depth longitudinal case study on HY, a leading air separation plant manufacturer in China, this paper attempts to test the preliminary conceptual model of secondary innovation and to explore new thoughts and implications for further development of the existing model. How did HY accelerate its secondary innovation through successful organizational learning during the past decades? According to the detailed conceptual model of secondary innovation stages and organizational learning modes, this case study elaborates HYs recent integrative learning process of the secondary innovation cycle of 1996–2005 within the new context of intensified international competition in a fast-growing developing country market with large domestic demand and large FDIs. Different from the traditional technological learning model, the secondary innovation model emphasizes the important interrelations and interactions combining the acquired technologies with existing technology systems and further with local user requirements, which can be named “structural understanding” and “functional understanding”.

A policy dimension required for technology roadmapping: learning from the emergence of Chinese wind turbine industry

Innovation policies play an important role throughout the development process of emerging industries in China. Existing policy and industry studies view the emergence process as a black-box, and fail to understand the impacts of policy to the process along which it varies. This paper aims to develop a multi-dimensional roadmapping tool to better analyse the dynamics between policy and industrial growth for new industries in China. Through reviewing the emergence process of Chinese wind turbine industry, this paper elaborates how policy and other factors influence the emergence of this industry along this path. Further, this paper generalises some Chinese specifics for the policy-industry dynamics. As a practical output, this study proposes a roadmapping framework that generalises some patterns of policy-industry interactions for the emergence process of new industries in China. This paper will be of interest to policy makers, strategists, investors and industrial experts.

Barriers to entrepreneurial growth: an empirical study on university spin‐offs in China

Purpose – Literature shows that university spin‐offs (USOs) have idiosyncratic strengths in comparison to other new firms; however, evidence also shows that Chinese USOs have a low survival rate, and only a small percent of them can grow into sustainable businesses. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical study to inquire about the variable growth barriers to Chinese USOs, in order to address two major research questions of this paper: what are the major growth barriers, and how significant they are; and what supports should university and government provide to eliminate those barriers?Design/methodology/approach – In the first place, this paper attempts to explore the research questions through literature review and pilot interviews, based on which, a questionnaire for a survey was developed. Then, this study then attempts to address the research questions through a nation‐wide survey in 2009 across 69 national university science parks.Findings – This paper finds that corporate governance is...

Effects of relational embeddedness on technological innovation: An empirical study in China

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the effecting mechanism of relational embeddedness on technological innovation performance in the context of China.Design/methodology/approach – By probing into the related theories and five exploratory case studies of Chinese manufacturing firms, this paper establishes a conceptual model about the effects of relational embeddedness on technological innovation performance and proposes nine hypotheses. The authors then investigate 228 Chinese manufacturing firms by questionnaires, and testify the hypotheses and conceptual model by structural equation modeling.Findings – Chinese firms relational embeddedness in the international manufacturing network has a positive effect on its technological innovation performance through explorative learning. Specifically, trust, information sharing and joint problem solving are beneficial to new knowledge acquisition and application, and then to the improvement of technological innovation performance.Research limitations...

Effects of control in open innovation: an empirical study of university-industry cooperation in China

Limited research about open innovation has examined in the influence of control modes on the performance of university-industry cooperation. This paper, therefore, attempts to find the impacts and concrete conveying links of diverse control modes on the performance of open innovation in the context of university-industry cooperation in China. This paper categorises control modes into behaviour control and output control, and also introduces knowledge transfer as mediator variable that links control and cooperation performance in explicit and tacit ways. Based on literature, this paper proposes seven hypotheses and uses structural equation modelling to validate them through analysing data collected from 212 questionnaires across China. As a result, this paper finds that industry-university cooperation, especially when featuring knowledge flow and sharing, should pay more attention to behaviour control, rather than over-emphasise output control as is stated in existing literature.

The Evolutionary Process of Secondary Innovation in the Context of Globalization: A Case Study.

This paper examines the evolutionary process of secondary innovation in a typical Chinese equipment manufacturing firm in the context of globalization and elaborates how to achieve latecomers advantage from imitation to innovation. Four stages are identified in the process of international manufacturing: the equipment import stage, the production cooperation stage, the R&D cooperation stage and the global operation stage. Technological innovation evolves as follows: from duplicative imitation to creative imitation, and then from exploitative innovation to explorative innovation. Through the evolutionary process, a firm can take advantage of globalization to accumulate knowledge and improve its capabilities, which enable it to upgrade in the global manufacturing network.

Roadmapping an emerging technology in clean energy industry: A case study of dimethyl ether development in China

Technology roadmapping has been used to strategize the development of energy technologies. However, there is limited roadmapping application that analyzes the emergence of a new energy technology and elaborates how this new technology forms a new industry and disrupts the old ones. This paper, therefore, focuses on the development of a roadmapping framework for strategizing the emergence and growth of a clean energy technology towards an industry, and proposes a systematic approach to integrate the lifecycle analysis (LCA) tool that is specific for assessing energy technologies. The proposed framework has been tentatively applied in a national-level strategic research on clean coal development, conducted by Chinese Academy of Engineering. This proposed framework can also be generalized to other clean energy industries, and we anticipate our paper will bring inspirations on roadmapping and strategizing the “right” technologies for the growth of Chinese energy industries.