Jun Su

A bibliometric study of China's science and technology policies: 1949---2010

This paper uses a bibliometric analysis method to probe into the evolution of China’s science and technology policies from 1949 to 2010, and the roles of core government agencies in policy-making. We obtained 4,707 Chinese S&T policies from GDIS, a Chinese public policy database provided by Tsinghua University. Co-word analysis and network analysis were applied in mapping the topics of S&T policies and collaboration among the agencies, while citation analysis was applied to assess the influence of S&T policies. Findings include: first, the focus of Chinese S&T policies is mainly on applied research and industrialization, rather than basic research; second, more and more government agencies are involved in making S&T policies, but collaboration efforts are not significantly increasing; last but not least, the influence of different S&T policies is determined by the administrative ranking of the policy-making agencies responsible for drafting those policies.

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...

Managing knowledge sharing in distributed innovation from the perspective of developers: empirical study of open source software projects in China

ABSTRACT Knowledge sharing is the key factor that influences the performance of open source software (OSS) projects, which are the representative cases of distributed innovation. This paper aims to explore the mechanism of knowledge sharing in OSS projects from the perspective of developers in China. A quantitative method with the analysis of 403 valid questionnaires is adopted. A series of hypotheses about how distributed innovation (independent variables) influences knowledge sharing (mediating variable) and then affects the performance of OSS projects (dependent variable) are tested and approved. On the one side, we argue that developers will actively affect knowledge sharing in terms of participative motivation, social network and organisational culture. On the other hand, users may also affect the knowledge sharing when considering innovation willingness and capacity. It is interesting to find that social network is the most important factor in Chinese cases. It is strongly recommended to strengthen the collaboration between software companies and OSS communities.

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...

How public demonstration project affects the emergence of a new industry: An empirical study on electric vehicle demonstration project in China

Public demonstration projects are receiving increasing attention, especially when some developing economies attempt to accelerate the emergence of new industries - though being questioned - through government interventions. This paper, therefore, aims to explore whether these demonstration policies can promote industrial emergence, at least in China; and what is the influential mechanism behind? This paper investigates Chinas demonstration project on electrical vehicle - “Ten Cities Thousand Cars” programme - through a survey with 1500 questionnaires. 437 valid returns have been analyzed by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) method. The result shows that the public demonstration project is effective in terms of information, application, and product diffusion. In addition, the result also validates the model that illustrates how demonstration policies affect industrial innovation via testing and showing functions. This paper helps to better understand how demonstration policies intervene industrial emergence, and it will be of interest to policy makers, industrialists and academics.

Policy change analysis based on “policy target–policy instrument” patterns: a case study of China’s nuclear energy policy

Policy documents are the carriers of policy and provide a channel for researchers to observe the main contents of a policy and the policy process. Policy documents are different from traditional scientific texts (including papers and patents) because they serve the function of governance and blueprint planning. This makes it impossible to accurately describe the content of policy texts by relying solely on traditional word-based bibliometric methods. In this paper, we propose a new bibliometric method for detecting changes in policy themes based on policy target–policy instrument patterns. We collected relevant policy documents under specific target topics, identified policy target–policy instrument patterns implied in those documents, and built a policy target–policy instrument network. Then, based on the eigenvector centrality features of network nodes, we identified the core “policy target” and core “policy instrument” in different time periods and ultimately identified the evolution of policy instruments and policy target, and also the continuity of policy targets. A case study of China’s nuclear energy policies was used to demonstrate the reliability of our method, and the results reflect the practical value of this method in quantitative analysis on policy documents.

An improved SAO network-based method for technology trend analysis: A case study of graphene

Abstract This paper proposes an improved Subject-Action-Object (SAO) network-based method for analyzing trends in technology development. It attempts to address shortcomings of the traditional SAO network approach, i.e., when setting Subject, Action and Object as nodes of the network, there may be errors in explaining the relationship between Subject Node and Object Node, and the strength of the relationship between subject and object also cannot be identified. The proposed improved SAO network-based method in this paper includes: (1) a new method for constructing an SAO network based on SAO links that calculate the intensity of the relationship between nodes; (2) a model for identifying technology development trends based on structural holes, changes in the distribution of node degrees, and shifts in network centrality. An empirical study on graphene technology is used to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.

A quantitative study on the regional patterns of China's light emitting diode industry policy

This paper studies the regional patterns of Chinas light emitting diode industry policy. The paper gathers policy contexts of the central government, Guangdong Province, Fujian Province and Jiangxi Province. By policy bibliometrics analysis and content analysis of the policy contexts external and internal characteristics, the paper explores the regional patterns on the policy-making time, policy-making agency and policy tool and discusses the relationship between policy orientation and the reality of industry development in various regions. The paper finds that there exist differences on the frequency of policy-making time and the administrative departments. Particularly, there are remarkable differences on the aims, emphases, means and valid period of policy tools. The analysis framework and method are applicable to the research of other industry policy, and the conclusion may be supportive to the authorities on policy making.

Successful or unsuccessful open source software projects: What is the key?

This paper aims to analyse the key factors influencing knowledge sharing in open source software projects. Four deep cases are analyzed to develop a conceptual framework based on within-case and cross-case analysis. In terms of data collection, online (including skype meeting, email, email-list, IRC, forum, group meeting, etc) and offline (mainly with face-to-face discussion) activities are two major platforms. The research framework is that distributed innovation (independent variable) will influence shared knowledge (medium variable) and continue to affect the performance of OSS projects (dependent variable). During distributed innovation, developers located on the supply side will affect the shared knowledge from the aspects of Participative Motivation, Social Network and Organizational Culture. Meanwhile, users situated on the demand side will function from the view of user innovation.