Jiancheng Guan

Innovative capability and export performance of Chinese firms

Abstract This paper considers the role of the seven innovation capability dimensions (learning, research and development (R&D), manufacturing, marketing, organizational, resource allocating and strategy planning) and the three firm characteristics (domestic market share, size and productivity growth rate) in determining the export performances for a sample of 213 Chinese industrial firms. The empirical analysis of this research reveals the findings listed below: 1. Export growth is closely related to the total improvement of innovation capability dimensions, except for the manufacturing capability. 2. While domestic market share has no significant impact on export performances, productivity growth rate significantly increases or promotes export performances rates. Furthermore, while the larger firms demonstrate stronger export competitiveness, there has been no finding of an inverted U-shaped relationship between export and firm size. 3. The core innovation assets (a set of R&D, manufacturing and marketing) alone cannot lead to sustainable export growth. On the contrary, the supplementary innovation assets (a set of four other dimensions) not only enable a firm’s technology assets to permeate into the entire competency integration, but also make it possible for a firm to acquire sustainable international competitiveness. This paper shows that the interaction and harmonizing of various innovation assets are the primary factors in the improvement of international competitiveness of Chinese firms.

A study of the relationship between competitiveness and technological innovation capability based on DEA models

Researchers and managers have been searching for appropriate methods to explore the relationship between technological innovation capability and competitiveness in recent years. This study attempts to find a systematic quantitative methodology to tackle this problem. In a recent survey covering 182 industrial innovative firms in China, the traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) model was employed to analyze the data collected. The research results show that only 16% of the enterprises operate on the best-practice frontier and there are some inconsistencies between organizational innovation capability and competitiveness in many enterprises. Decreasing returns to scale were found among about 70% of the inefficient enterprises and increasing returns to scale were found among the remaining 30% of the inefficient enterprises. Thus the internal innovation harmonizing process in these enterprises is considerably inefficient. Based on the restricted ranges of the input/output factors, a multi-objective DEA projection model has also been developed in this study to provide a benchmark for auditing competitiveness. Research results further indicate that there is still much room for enterprises to improve competitiveness in situations of confining score ranges of technological innovation capability and competitiveness.

Collaboration between industry and research institutes/universities on industrial innovation in Beijing, China

Abstract Most R&D resources in China were allocated to public research institutes/universities until the economic transition of the mid 1990s. To maximize the return from these resources, it is important to have a healthy collaboration between industry and research institutes/universities on industrial innovation. This paper examines that relationship and discusses some empirical evidence on its efficiency with particular reference to industry in Beijing. Following a survey of 950 industrial enterprises, the influences of the collaboration relationship on industrial innovation were analyzed. The main findings indicate that the technology novelty of industrial innovation is positively related to that relationship, i.e. the more the collaboration, the higher the technology novelty of the innovation. However, the collaboration relationship is less efficient in terms of economic performance indicators such as innovation sales and profit ratios, to measure innovation. Moreover, the collaboration relationship is still far from efficient in stimulating industrial innovation in China. The major barriers to successful collaboration have also been addressed in this paper with the aim of devising policies and suggesting possible improvements to collaboration efficiency.

A comparative study of research performance in computer science

The paper compares the research performance in computer science of four major Western countries, India and China, based on the data abstracted from INSPEC database during the period 1993–2002. A total of 9,632 computer science papers recorded in INSPEC database were used for the comparison. The findings indicate that, on the one hand, the number of papers produced in China has considerably increased in the past few years. Particularly, in recent years, China occupies a remarkable high position in terms of counts of papers indexed by the INSPEC database. On the other hand, Chinese scientists preferred to publish in domestic journals and proceedings and shares of SCI-papers to the total journal papers for China have still remained the lowest. This indicates that the research activities of Chinese scientists in computer science are still rather “local” and suffer from a low international visibility. Various scientometric indicators, such as Normalized Impact Factor, ratio of papers in high quality journals are further adopted to analyze research performance and diverse finding are obtained. Nevertheless, for these surrogate indicators, China has optimistically achieved great progress, characterized with “low level of beginning and high speed of developing”. The policy implication of the findings lies in that China, as well as other less developed countries in science, can earn relative competitive advantages in some new emerging or younger disciplines such as computer science by properly using catch-up strategy.

Patent-bibliometric analysis on the Chinese science - technology linkages

The purpose of this study is to explore the character and pattern of the linkage between science and technology in China, based on the database of United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The analysis is focused on the period 1995–2004, a rapid increasing period for Chinese US patents. Using the scientific non-patent references (NPRs) within patents, we investigate the science-technology connection in the context of Chinese regions as well as industrial sectors classified by International Patent Classification (IPC). 11 technological domains have been selected to describe the science intensity of the technology. The results suggest that the patents and the corresponding scientific citations are related in different ways. Finally, we match the scientific NPRs to the Science Citation Index (SCI) covered publications to identify the core journals and categories. It reveals that the scientific references covered by SCI show a skewed distribution not only in journals but also in categories.

A bibliometric study of China’s semiconductor literature compared with other major asian countries

In this paper we compare the scientific research in the semiconductor-related field in China with some other major nations in Asia. It is based on the bibliometric information from SCI-Expanded database during the time period of 1995–2004. We show that China has been developing fast in semiconductor research, and become the second productive country in Asia as reflected by the publication profile. The evidences indicate a significant increasing trend in the research efforts and readership among Asian countries. Similar to the scientists in Japan and South Korea, Chinese scientists were more inclined to work in larger groups, typically 4 or more authors. The assessment of research quality is further conducted based on citation-based measures. As benchmarks, two western countries, namely USA and Germany, have been compared in the citation analysis. It is revealed that the impacts of research outputs in the Asian countries, except for Japan, have been badly incommensurate with their devoted research efforts compared with USA and Germany. Like most of other Asian countries the research results of Chinese scientists in semiconductor have a low international visibility despite their strong research efforts and increasingly large domestic readership. The application of Leimkuhler curve illustrates vividly the inequality of citation times among the compared countries. Furthermore, the Gini Indices of each country and each pair of countries are calculated which illustrates again the inequality of informetric productivities.

Mapping collaborative knowledge production in China using patent co-inventorships

Only a few cases of systematic empirical research have been reported investigating collaborative knowledge production in China and its implications for China’s national and regional innovation system. Using Chinese patent data in the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this paper examines the geographic variations in intraregional, inter-regional and international knowledge exchanges of China from 1985 to 2007. Degree centrality reveals that intraregional and international collaborations are the main channels of knowledge exchange for the provinces and municipalities of China while inter-regional knowledge exchange is relatively weak. Besides, over the two decades, the knowledge exchange network has been expanding (connecting an increasing number of provinces and countries), becoming more decentralized (increasing number of hubs) and more cohesive (more linkages). A blockmodel analysis further reveals that the inter-regional network of China begins to show characteristics of a core-periphery structure. The most active knowledge exchange occurs between members of the core block composed by the most advanced provinces while the members of the peripheral block from less favored regions have few or no local and extra-local knowledge exchange. Building a strong knowledge transfer network would much improve the innovation capacities in less favored regions and help them break out from their “locked-in” development trajectories.

Comparison and evaluation of Chinese research performance in the field of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is an emerging and rapidly evolving discipline. The bioinformatics literature is growing exponentially. This paper aims to provide an integrated bibliometric study of the knowledge base of Chinese research community, based on the bibliometric information in the field of bioinformatics from SCI-Expanded database during the period of 2000–2005. It is found that China is productive in bioinformatics as far as publication activity in international journals is concerned. For comparative purpose, the results are benchmarked against the findings from five other major nations in the field of bioinformatics: USA, UK, Germany, Japan and India. In terms of collaboration profile, the findings imply that the collaborative scope of China has gradually transcended boundaries of organizations, regions and nations as well. Finally, further analyses on the citation share and some surrogate scientometric indicators show that the publications of Chinese authors suffer from a lowest international visibility among the six countries. Strikingly, Japan has achieved most remarkable impact of publication when compared to research effort devoted to bioinformatics amongst the six countries. The policy implication of the findings lies in that Chinese scientific community needs much work on improving the research impact and pays more attention to strengthening the academic linkages between China and worldwide nations, particularly scientifically advanced countries.

An exploratory study on collaboration profiles of Chinese publications in Molecular Biology

SummaryAs science has become much complex and sophisticated, greater attention is paid to scientific collaboration within recent bibliometric studies. A total of 6538 publications in Molecular Biology from China during 1999-2003, as indicated by data collected from database of the Science Citation Index Expanded - Web Edition, have been analyzed. A large proportion of publications have been authored by more than 3 scientists. The composition of publications grouped by collaboration patterns are: 1.58% non-collaborative papers, 42.43% local papers, 34.37% domestic papers and 21.62% international papers on average during the studied period. The countries with which China has collaborative links and their frequencies are all itemized to indicate the intensity of international collaboration in the field of Molecular Biology. Finally, the differences between the impact of wholly indigenous papers and internationally collaborative papers have been compared. The results indicate that foreign collaboration does contribute a lot to the improvement of the mainstream connectivity and international visibility.

Modeling macro-R&D production frontier performance: an application to Chinese province-level R&D

This paper proposes a novel methodological framework for effectively measuring the production frontier performance (PFP) of macro-scale (regional or national) R&D activities themselves associated with two improved models: a non-radial data envelopment analysis (DEA) model and a nonradial Malmquist index. In particular, the framework can provide multidimensional information to benchmark various R&D efficiency indexes (i.e., technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency) as well as the total factor R&D productivity change (determined by three components: “catch-up” of R&D efficiency, “frontier shift” of R&D technology as well as “exploitation” of R&D scale economics effect) at a comparable production frontier. It can be used to not only investigate the potential and sustainable capacity of innovation but also screen and finance R&D projects at the regional or national level. We have applied the framework to a province-level panel dataset on R&D activities of 30 selected Chinese provinces.