中小企业技术创新网络的知识创造研究

中小企业以知识创造为目标构建或加入技术创新网络,以与网络中其它组织之间的优势互补、相互协作的方式来进行合作创新,为中小企业技术创新能力的提高提供了可行性思路。将典型的技术创新网络分为弱连接和强连接两种形态,在分析网络特征及知识创造过程的基础上,分别提出了两种形态在技术创新网络内部知识创造的机制模型。     

Strategic foresight in corporate organizations: Handling the effect and response uncertainty of technology and social drivers of change

Today many companies in many industries put a lot of efforts into monitoring and investigating emerging drivers of change in their business environment, particularly in relation to new technologies and events in the social, economic, political and ecological landscapes which surround their industry. So far scholars in the literature on foresight and future studies focused on the techniques and practices for analysing the “state” uncertainty about the likely path of evolution of emerging drivers of change. Anyway, less attention was devoted to the “effect” uncertainty about the impact of drivers of change on the competitive position of the firm and to the “response” uncertainty about how to take advantage of these drivers. These are the main issues we take into account, through a field research on firms that, notwithstanding they were able to properly assess the likely evolution (state uncertainty) of relevant drivers of change in their industry, either were successful or dramatically failed in handling the effect and response uncertainty of these drivers. Moreover, we carried out multiple case studies of some large companies that have established an organizational unit dedicated to strategic foresight. Overall, the results of our research may contribute to improve the effectiveness of strategic foresight and to increase its value added to the planning process of corporate firms, while providing helpful insight to public organizations that promote foresight exercises for enhancing the competitiveness of local firms.     

Bridging the gap between foresight and market research: Integrating methods to assess the economic potential of nanotechnology

This paper discusses how to bridge the gap between foresight research oriented to the long-term, and traditional market research oriented to the medium to short term, when applied to an early stage of a technology's life cycle. It proposes using an integrating approach, i.e. a combination of methods and both foresight and traditional market research. A mix of complementary methods for the acquisition and analysis of data is presented in a case study. This helps to overcome the deficits of some qualitative foresight methods and quantitative methods often used in traditional market research and allows us to examine research results from the different methods applied both on their own and as a group. In the absence of a single fully-fledged and accepted economic approach, this paper argues that combined market research and foresight modules are the best possible approach for analyzing the economic potential of emerging technologies like nanotechnology. In the future, similar applications of such market foresight modules may be useful, for example, as elements of foresight. They will also be useful in studies of emerging technologies (e.g. converging technologies, cognitive science and Web 2.0) where traditional market research does not produce a realistic market assessment.     

Emerging technologies in emerging markets: Introduction to the special section

Emerging technologies have significant implications and profound consequences for firms, markets, government policy, and society as a whole. In emerging markets, however, social uncertainties are as important as technological and market uncertainties, and moreover are somewhat more complex. The papers in this special section offer views of how these important social uncertainties can be considered concurrently with technological and market uncertainties, particularly because they play a relatively larger role in emerging markets than in more advanced markets.     

Different approaches of pattern management and strategic intelligence

The world around us contains endless amounts of information. That information is mostly loose in our minds. Very often, it does not at first contact fit in with our conventional understanding, experience or any context we are used to. Hence, we may say that we are overwhelmed with constantly changing raw data, and strategic actors especially tend to be short of more rapid, up-to-date, valid and in-depth understanding of the transforming business landscape and social environment. Strategic intelligence is an emerging field of business consulting, which aims to undertake the task of revealing large, complex or complicated issues of transformation in a more understandable form. Pattern management, however, can be seen as one field or one approach of strategic intelligence. It is an approach that may, on one hand, be based more on empiric data and formal structures than other forms of strategic intelligence, but, on the other hand, it is a very heuristic approach to integrate quantitative data, reasoning and narratives. The main attempts of this article are, first, to show, what are in general the most commonly used ways of managing, finding, drawing, reasoning or anticipating patterns from our environment, and second, to locate how the concept of pattern can be understood in different ways. From the gathered knowledge, this article presents three main categories of reasoning patterns: empirical calculation (EC) is common especially in enterprise consulting. Theory proving with observations (TPO) is common especially in natural sciences, and real combining (RC) is common especially in qualitative research and in narrative.     

企业家社会网络对企业绩效的影响机制

本文在国内外文献就企业家的社会网络关系研究进行回顾与综述的基础上,总结了社会网络的类型及其正反两方面的影响,指出了当前许多研究片面强调企业家外部网络的作用,而忽视了内部网络。国内外研究表明,企业家社会网络对企业绩效有着正向的影响,其影响机制存在多种变量。本文根据这些研究结果,在理论上提出了企业家内、外社会网络对企业绩效影响机制的模型,并指出了其实践意义以及未来研究方向。     

知识网络中的社会资本及其作用

知识网络的绩效,在一定程度上取决于网络伙伴间社会资本与信任关系的形成。社会资本在知识网络中起着不可忽视的重要作用,其积极作用主要有:促进组织间交互学习;减少交易费用;促进风险分担;形成知识网络的竞争优势,进而增强网络成员的竞争优势;有利于解决知识网络中产生的\"囚徒困境\"等问题。而其消极作用主要有:易帮派化;易冒进;易产生锁定。     

The value contribution of strategic foresight: Insights from an empirical study of large European companies

This paper focuses on exploring the potential and empirically observable value creation of strategic foresight activities in firms. We first review the literature on strategic foresight, innovation management and strategic management in order to identify the potential value contributions. We use survey data from 77 large multinational firms to assess how much value is generated from formalized strategic foresight practices in these firms. We show that it is possible to capture value through (1) an enhanced capacity to perceive change, (2) an enhanced capacity to interpret and respond to change, (3) influencing other actors, (4) and through an enhanced capacity for organizational learning.     

Forecasting the Technology Revolution: Results and learnings from the TechCast Project

This research report presents latest results on the TechCast Project, first reported in Technology Forecasting & Social Change 14 years ago [1]. TechCast is an online Delphi system that pools background trends and the judgment of experts around the world to forecast breakthroughs in all fields. Results are presented for strategic technological advances that are likely to enter the mainstream and their expected impacts, providing an overview of the Technology Revolution. Aggregating the forecast data then provides macro-forecasts of broad timetables for economic and social change. This analysis suggests that the global economy is likely to enter a new economic upcycle about 2015 and reach an advanced stage of development about 2020. We also examine examples of how organizations develop technology strategy to compete in an era of economic transformation, and conclude by analyzing the role of forecasting as one of many methods for reducing uncertainty.     

Returns from social capital in open source software networks

Open Source Software projects base their operation on a collaborative structure for knowledge exchange in the form of provision or reception of information, expertise and feedback on the creation of source code. Here, we address the direction of these knowledge flows among projects throughout social networks and their impact on project success. We identify the roles of membership or contribution that individuals play within projects. We found that connections through contributors who bring their knowledge to the project, improve project success, and that connection through members, who transfer their knowledge towards other projects, enhance project success. Finally, we found that ties through shared membership and contributions hamper project success. The analysis of knowledge flows and their impact on project success imply a translation of returns from investment in social capital, where investment takes the shape of knowledge flows and the returns mean the projects’ diffusion over the network.

Technological generalizations and leitbilder—the anticipation of technological opportunities

Recent national technology foresight studies as well as the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University are very much based on “nodes of discussion.” These short statements are called, e.g., topics, issues, or developments. This article provides a framework for the classification and analysis of nodes related to future technological development. Key concepts of the article are “technological generalization” and “leitbild.” The topics in the technology foresight Delphi studies can be seen as different kinds of generalizations from already realized technological developments. Leitbild is a German word. Its most general meaning is a guiding image. Like a common vision, a leitbild creates a shared overall goal, offers orientation toward one long-term overall goal, and provides a basis for different professions and disciplines to work in the same direction. The analysis of leitbilder and emerging technological paradigms might contribute to the construction of topics and issues and to the argumentation processes related to them.     

Bayesian learning in social networks

We extend the standard model of social learning in two ways. First, we introduce a social network and assume that agents can only observe the actions of agents to whom they are connected by this network. Secondly, we allow agents to choose a different action at each date. If the network satisfies a connectedness assumption, the initial diversity resulting from diverse private information is eventually replaced by uniformity of actions, though not necessarily of beliefs, in finite time with probability one. We look at particular networks to illustrate the impact of network architecture on speed of convergence and the optimality of absorbing states. Convergence is remarkably rapid, so that asymptotic results are a good approximation even in the medium run.     

新兴技术社会风险化解的前瞻性治理特征

新兴技术这柄“双刃剑”虽然给国家带来新发展动能,但也同时引发诸多社会风险,如何化解新兴技术社会风险成为新兴技术治理面临的难题。前瞻性治理研究为新兴技术社会风险化解提供了一些思考,但是相关研究较为分散和模糊,相关经验难以奏效。运用文本分析法和层次分析法,聚焦治理主体、过程和结果3个要素,提炼新兴技术社会风险化解的前瞻性治理特征,并在中国情境下检验其适用性。结果表明,公众参与结果纳入既定政策议程、否决权、新兴技术公众参与法律法规等前瞻性特征得到专家一致认同,认为它们是新兴技术社会风险化解的必要条件。研究结论对提高新兴技术社会风险治理绩效具有一定理论启示。     

An information-based adaptive strategy for resource exploitation in competitive scenarios

Given an exploitation problem, in which a number of agents compete for a limited renewable resource, the optimal harvesting strategy depends on the ratio between resource availability and exploitation effort. For scarce resource a purely competitive, greedy strategy outperforms a more collaborative approach based on the Collective Intelligence, while for more abundant resource the opposite holds. The rationale for this behaviour lies in the amount of information each strategy is able to provide and a combined strategy is possible according to which agents choose dynamically the most informative strategy according to a minimum entropy criterion. This approach, which provides best performance for both under and over-exploited scenarios, can be used to monitor the resource status for management purposes and is effective in both centralised and decentralised decision making.     

Regional social capital: Embeddedness, innovation networks and regional economic development

Technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regional economic development. Regional innovation networks transform technology into competitiveness of firms and thus contribute to economic development. Intangible assets, such as social capital, decide how effective regional innovation networks function. Differences in regional social capital thus help explain regional differences in economic development. Regional social capital originates from the embeddedness of firms in regional webs of social relations. The norms, values and customs of these networks facilitate collaboration for mutual benefit. As innovation is increasingly a network effort, embeddedness and social capital also help explain how and why networks of innovating companies are successful, as the case study of the Stimulus Cluster Scheme shows.