Vittoria Giada Scalera

A longitudinal study of MNE innovation: the case of Goodyear

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the innovation trajectory, and knowledge pipelines of mature industry multinational enterprises (MNEs). The ability to innovate constantly amidst a turbulent and competitive environment is often the key force behind MNE survival and dominance. Design/methodology/approach – This study conducts an in-depth longitudinal study of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, a global manufacturing company in the tire and rubber industry. The findings are based on USPTO patent and trademark data from 1975-2005. Findings – The analysis reveals three crucial trends: the major role of continuous investment in innovation in the firm’s survival and turnaround; the evolution of the firm’s innovation network from a headquarters-centric model toward more geographical dispersal; and the changing mix of innovation from traditional “hard” science-based research toward a greater emphasis on “softer” competencies in design and trademarks. This third trend, in partic...

Is Green the New Gold? Venture Capital and Green Entrepreneurship

We test whether born-to-be-green represents a signal toward potential venture capital (VC) investors on a sample of Italian, independent, unlisted, high-tech entrepreneurial firms. We employ several identification strategies by controlling for the major potential signals, and the alleged selection bias between green and non-green entrepreneurs. We exploit firm-level information about the “active search for VC financing�?. Alternatively, we exploit the cross-local communities variation in the awareness about environmental issues in an Instrumental Variables setting. Our results show that neither running a business based on green technologies nor positioning a business in a green sector per se are strongly correlated with the likelihood to get VC. Instead, we find that born-to-be-green can be a reliable signal for investors only when entrepreneurs perform activities based on green technologies/products and position their business in a green sector, at the same time. Further, we present three contingencies that moderate the association between green business propositions and the likelihood to get VC, namely the technical/scientific education of the founder(s), the origin of the firm as academic spin-out, and the presence of corporate shareholders into the venture’s equity. The paper offers relevant managerial implications.

Risks and governance modes in offshoring decisions: linking supply chain management and international business perspectives

ABSTRACT Governing offshoring has become a major challenge for firms that run operations outside the home country. International business (IB) and supply chain management (SCM) literature offer different insights on the topic, focusing especially on possible governance modes and the drivers of this choice, with different perspectives. Grounding the discussion at the intersection between these two research fields, the present study first proposes a taxonomy of offshoring risks (i.e. tasks, operational, reputational and institutional), with corresponding risk factors in each category; then, a set of research propositions are formulated, in order to link these categories to the governance-mode choice. Furthermore, we argue that the risk–governance link is moderated by two relevant factors, that is, the offshoring firm size and the strategic relevance of the outsourced activity. As a result, we elaborate on the interrelation between IB and SCM theories, emphasising the impact of risk management and contingent factors in offshoring governance modes configurations.

Managing Innovation in Emerging Economies: Organizational Arrangements and Resources of Foreign MNEs in the Chinese Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract To investigate the impact of knowledge-intensive FDI in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, this study analyzes the activity of foreign MNEs operating in this context by exploring their innovative background, the organizational arrangements they use for local knowledge creation and the performance of their local innovative processes. Based on the analysis of the universe of USPTO pharmaceutical patents applied for between 1975 and 2010 and granted to foreign assignees utilizing the work of Chinese inventors, our results show that, while the presence of foreign MNEs in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry entails a strong potential for positive externalities that could enhance the performance of the local innovation system, such externalities do not completely materialize yet, likely because of local actors’ limited absorptive capacity.

Exploring the international connectivity of Chinese inventors in the pharmaceutical industry

This paper explores the integration of emerging countries into the global system of innovation, as a channel for their technological catch-up. Using data on the innovative activity in the Chinese pharmaceutical industry, we analyze the geographic dispersion of inventor networks linked to China, as a function of the characteristics of the innovative actors that coordinate their inventive work.

Innovation in US metropolitan areas: the role of global connectivity

Managing and leveraging innovation and knowledge generation are key components of value creation by firms in a globally connected world. In this project we analyze innovative activity in the over a 35-year period (1975-2010) to understand the nature and extent of international connectedness of U.S. knowledge networks. Our analysis parses a comprehensive dataset comprising the population of USPTO patents to extract information on inventor co-location. We use this to generate a knowledge map of inventor networks for each of the top 35 Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs), tracking innovative activity and connectedness across geography and over time. We find that in the 1975-90 period, inventor numbers and growth rates tracked overall population numbers, so that the large population centers (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia) accounted for the largest shares. However, in the decades between 1990 and 2010, inventor numbers rose most rapidly in West and South, so that by the end of the period the dominant innovative centers of the country were the Silicon Valley CBSAs of San Francisco and San Jose, Austin, Seattle, Portland and San Diego.

Sovereign Wealth Fund Investments and Stock Prices: The Effect of Target Industry and Location

We investigate the determinants of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments’ stock prices. We focus on the location of the investment (domestic versus cross-border) and the target industry (strategic versus non-strategic). To control for endogeneity, we use two identification strategies: OLS estimation with SWF-specific fixed effects to control for fund quality/experience, and instrumental variables estimation. Our results show that cross-border investments have an average higher increase in stock price than domestic investments, while investments in strategic industries show an higher drop in stock price than investments in non-strategic industries. We also find that the higher is the politicization of the fund, and the higher is the stock price drop. Our results are robust to controls for bilateral political relations between the SWFs’ and target country, fund type (SWFs versus Sovereign Pension Reserve Funds), fund opacity, SWFs’ equity stake, use of investment vehicles, target country’s market capitalization/GDP ratio, and time effects.

The spectacular rise of the Indian pharmaceutical industry

Over the second half of the 20th century, Indian pharmaceutical firms were nudged by government policies to focus on import substitution. To this end, they were encouraged to produce generic variants of foreign MNEs’ branded drugs. In response, MNE strategies in India became strongly focused on intellectual property (IP) protection, most typically implemented through the avoidance of collaboration with domestic firms. Hence, domestic firms in the industry developed mostly independently from the influence of foreign firms but with a strong guidance from governmental policies. Everything changed when India ratified the provisions of TRIPS in 1995 and committed to full implementation by 2005. A significant number of domestic firms recognized that the returns to imitative, re-engineering oriented innovation would inexorably decline under the new regime. These firms implemented aggressive new strategies aimed at generating world- class product innovation. In this paper, we document the rise of these Indian domestic innovation champions.