Yuandi Wang

Foreign Direct Investment Spillovers and the Geography of Innovation in Chinese Regions: The Role of Regional Industrial Specialization and Diversity

Wang Y., Ning L., Li J. and Prevezer M. Foreign direct investment spillovers and the geography of innovation in Chinese regions: the role of regional industrial specialization and diversity, Regional Studies. Foreign direct investment (FDI) brings technology spillovers, but little is known about the interactive effects of industrial structure at the regional level on how FDI works to bring spillovers. This paper brings together technological spillovers from FDI with impacts on regional innovation through industrial structure. This is important for China as a recipient of FDI which is both regionally skewed and unevenly distributed. Results indicate that inward FDI has positive effects on regional innovation, but that industrial specialization diminishes the positive effects of FDI whilst a more diversified industrial structure enhances spillovers from inward FDI.

How Chinese firms employ open innovation to strengthen their innovative performance

China became the second-largest economy behind the USA in 2010. While there is quite some macroeconomic research documenting the technological catching-up of China as a nation, there is only little research studying how individual Chinese firms are catching up. This paper draws on the open innovation perspective to explore how Chinese firms improve their innovative performance. Our empirical analysis is based on a sample of 91 native Chinese firms in high-tech industries. The results indicate that Chinese

Have Chinese firms learned from their prior technology in-licensing? An analysis based on patent citations

With the rapid rise of Chinese economy, now ranking as the second largest economy in the world in 2010, many Chinese firms have started taking technological lead in the global market. Nevertheless, whether Chinese firms have learned from their prior in-licensing technologies and accumulated technological capabilities in sustaining their economic growth remains underexplored. This paper aims to fill this void. Using a unique dataset containing the information on licensing for 83 large Chinese firms in the electronic sector during 2000–2004, we find that these firms have successfully learned from the international technologies that they previously licensed-in when subsequent patent citations made by these Chinese licensee firms to their licensed patents are used to identify these successful learners.

A new measurement of intellectual capital and its impact on innovation performance in an open innovation paradigm

Companies have traditionally considered innovation an internal process, and accordingly, they have relied on their internal intellectual capital. However, this closed innovation strategy has, in recent years, been superseded by an open innovation strategy. The existing measurement model of intellectual capital, which is concerned mainly with an internal dimension, is no longer appropriate for open innovation practice. To address this challenge, this paper reconstructs the measurement model of intellectual capital, expanding the concept to include both internal and external dimensions, both of which have the same three elements: human, structural, and relationship capital. To test the reliability and validity of this new model, we explore the impact of each element on innovation performance through an empirical study of 149 companies in China, and we find that all elements of internal and external intellectual capital have a significantly positive impact on innovation performance. This implies that our new measurement is appropriate for firms with an increasing degree of openness for innovation.

How do the BRIC countries play their roles in the global innovation arena? A study based on USPTO patents during 1990---2009

This paper proposes a new taxonomy for the internationalization patterns of innovation of the BRIC countries within the global innovation landscape during the period 1990–2009. Based on the BRICs’ patents granted by the USPTO, we find (1) the BRICs gradually increased their roles in the global innovation arena with various degrees of internationalization; (2) the domestic-dominant pattern has widely countered the foreign dominance of innovation, while the collaborative multi-dominant pattern has increased; (3) a divergence of the BRICs’ global innovation output growth emerged, while their internationalization pattern portfolios evolved towards greater similarity; and (4) China has differentiated itself by increasing its global innovation influence.

Firm ownership, industrial structure, and regional innovation performance in China's provinces

This paper uses panel data between 2000 and 2010 to explore how firm ownership and regional industrial structures contribute to regional innovation performance in Chinese provinces. Specifically, we explore how the extent of specialisation and diversification in regional industrial structures at the province level fosters both Marshall–Arrow–Romer and Jacobs spillovers, as well as how foreign and state ownership influence regional innovation. We find: (i) Chinas regional innovation systems benefit from Jacobs but not MAR externalities, with the former spurring higher quality innovation in the form of increased invention patenting; (ii) state-owned enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises advance local innovation, with the latter again fostering higher quality innovation; and (iii) a convergence towards a combination of low specialisation and high diversity in provincial industrial structure is taking place between Chinas more developed inland coastal provinces and less developed inland provinces. Implications and suggestions for policy-making and future research are discussed.

Collaboration strategies and effects on university research: evidence from Chinese universities

Previous studies have provided inconsistent evidence pertaining to the relationship between university–industry collaboration and university performance. This study’s objective is to go beyond traditional viewpoints, which mostly confine university–industry collaboration within a separate channel, to build the relationship between university–industry collaboration overall channel characteristics and university research performance. In doing so, we define two collaboration strategies, collaboration breadth, which is the scope of different channels, and collaboration depth, which is the extent that universities deepen into different channels. Based on a comprehensive panel dataset of Chinese universities in mainland China in 2009–2013, we find that collaboration breadth and collaboration depth have a linear and curvilinear effect on academic research performance, respectively. Moreover, the interaction of collaboration breadth and depth shows a negative impact on academic research performance.

Patterns of R&D internationalisation in developing countries: China as a case

Some developing countries are emerging as nexuses in the globalisation of innovation activities, serving as the location for crucial R&D activities from developed multinational firms (DMFs), which are headquartered in developed countries, and spawning emerging multinational firms (EMFs), which are headquartered in developing countries and conduct some of their R&D in developed countries. This paper proposes a framework and a methodology to identify international patterns of innovation at the firm-level as well as at the national level. According to a reconstruction of the R&D owner-inventor structure, we develop the analytical framework as a 3 × 3 matrix and identify three different patterns for both EMFs and DMFs in the organisation of their R&D internationalisation activities. We derive from this matrix three patterns at the national level to describe the ways how a developing country can reach the global innovation stage. We use China as a case to verify this framework.

Does technological diversification matter for regional innovation capability? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT This study empirically examines the relationship between technological diversification and regional innovation capability (RIC) based on 30 Chinese provinces from 2001 to 2011. Our results support the positive role of technological diversification in affecting RIC. We also investigate the moderating effects of R&D investments and openness on the diversification-innovation relationship. The results indicate that R&D investments exert a positive effect on RIC, while openness, measured as foreign direct investment, exerts a negative influence on RIC. We thus argue that the positive diversification-innovation relationship is contingent on multiple factors. Both policy and practical implications are discussed.

External heterogeneity and its impact on open innovation performance

While current research commonly finds there may be an optimum overall level of search depth commitment at the apex of an inverted U relationship, it says comparatively little about the optimal allocation of search depth between competing search channels. Neither does it explore in depth the qualitative differences in the breadth of different external search channels. Here we conceptually and empirically explore the idea of the intra-search channel allocation problem using the concept of heterogeneity in search depth and breadth. We explore how variations in the distribution of open innovation search depth and breadth influnence innovation performance and in doing so contribute to a more fine grained conceptual understanding of external innovation. We do so an emerging market context, namely China. Our contributions are therefore twofold, involving both conceptual and empirical elements.