Managing global research and development in China: Patterns of R&D configuration and evolution

The growing internationalization of R&D activities challenges multinational corporations (MNCs) to formulate technology strategies and manage increasingly diffuse and diverse networks of R&D laboratories and alliances in the context of disparate national institutions. This paper examines the evolutionary processes of MNCs' R&D strategies in China in terms of two principal dimensions, i.e. geographic dispersion and functional focus. Based on a study of 378 international R&D centers and alliances established in China over the 1995-2001 period, we investigate the evolution of managing international R&D configurations in an emerging economy. The model is further illustrated with key findings from case studies of three leading high-tech MNCs in managing their global R&D operations in China over 1996-2004, specifically Fujitsu, Motorola and Nokia. This study contributes to the existing literature by exploring the globalization of R&D through foreign centers of scientific and technological excellence, which enables MNCs to innovate closer to their product markets and manufacturing facilities in emerging markets.     

Choosing Between Internal and Non-internal R&D Activities: Some Technological and Economic Factors

This paper evaluates some of the technological and economic factors that underlie the choice between in-house R&D, R&D alliances and outsourcing. We recount the reasons for the growth in non-internal activities, and explain why these are not as prevalent for R&D as other value-adding activities, and highlight that outsourcing is most often undertaken where multiple, substitutable sources are available. We then develop two frameworks. First, a static framework is developed, which evaluates the choice of mode based on a firm's distribution of competencies, and their strategic importance. Second, a dynamic framework is developed that demonstrates how the static framework differs depending on whether the firm is engaged in pre-paradigmatic, paradigmatic or post-paradigmatic sectors. We also consider the effect of new technologies being introduced to a firm's portfolio of competencies     

Effects of Incumbency and R&D Affiliation on the Legitimation of Electric Vehicle Technologies

Non-economic forces distort “rational” competitions among emerging technologies and associated trajectories. For example, incumbent and credibly affiliated firms use their legitimacy to promote their technological preferences and denigrate the efforts of less legitimate firms. This article reports results of a study which examined these dynamics in the competition among emerging electrochemical innovations aimed at the electric vehicle industry. It also presents the first-known use of the technology forecasting technique called morphological analysis in business academia. Similarities and differences between media representations of innovation activities, versus actual industry-wide developments, were found to have theoretical and practitioner implications. It was found that (1) incumbent firms were not participating meaningfully, rendering that variable largely moot; (2) effects of R&D affiliation were marginally significant; that while (3) performance advantages and disadvantages were reported in the media much more frequently than respective cost-price advantages and disadvantages, that (4) the relative performance advantages and disadvantages of competing innovations were reported in a balanced way, but that (5) the pattern of reports concerning cost-price was unbalanced in a way that favored the dominant design plus relatively modest departures from it. The overall interpretation indicated that relatively modest types of innovations were “winning” the early battle in a subtle but important way, despite representing a trajectory that was not certain to be the most rational, from a performance and/or cost-price focus.     

Why is TFP growth sectorally concentrated?

Research shows that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is weak in European countries. This is inter alia attributed to the fact that substantial TFP growth is limited to a few industries. Because TFP growth is typically understood as technological progress, it is concluded that technology diffusion between sectors in Europe is hampered. We use EU KLEMS data sets to decompose sectoral TFP for nine European countries by means of a Malmquist approach in order to identify potential sources besides technical progress. Applying Harberger diagrams, we describe the sectoral distribution of TFP growth, efficiency gains and losses, economies of scale and technological progress. The analysis reveals that technological progress is quite evenly distributed across sectors in most European countries. The wide scattering of TFP growth is explained by deviating efficiency developments and the unused economies of scale. We conclude that the technology transfer between sectors in most European countries seems to work. Therefore, Europe in general does not need a new technology policy, but a further integration of the markets and a reduction of national market entry barriers. This requires further unification of pan-European standards in fields like trade and crafts codes or consumer protection policies.     

What broad banks do, and markets don’t: Cross-subsidization

We show that interbank markets are a poor substitute for “broad” banks that operate across regions or sectors. In the presence of regional or sectoral asset and liquidity shocks, interbank markets can distribute liquidity efficiently, but fail to respond efficiently to asset shocks. Broad banks can condition on the joint distribution of both shocks and, hence, achieve an efficient internal allocation of capital. This allocation involves the cross-subsidization of loans across regions or sectors. Compared to regional banks that are linked through well-functioning interbank markets, broad banks lead to higher levels of aggregate investment, higher output, and less fluctuations within regions. However, broad banks generate endogenously aggregate uncertainty.     

R&D Corporate Planning: Selecting the Core Technological Competencies

This paper deals with the selection of a firm's technological competencies on which to concentrate development efforts in a long term view. The perspective is that of corporate R&D which has to identify the technological competencies relevant to future competition and select those core for the firm. This process faces a major challenge, especially to put together different issues relevant to the problem: identify future scenarios and predict how new industries will be shaped, evaluate the potential of future markets, estimate the role and relevance of the technologies involved, identify a balanced set of technologies. This paper proposes a comprehensive methodology to support the process of selection of core technological competencies.     

Sectoral and aggregate technology growth in Spain

In this paper we analyze technological change in the Spanish economy by constructing adjusted Solow residuals, where the adjustment attempts to correct for the bias associated with the potential presence of imperfect competition, increasing returns, variable input utilization and, especially, sectoral reallocation of inputs across sectors. We refer to this modified Solow residual as a technology index. Sectoral reallocations and variable input utilization are key determinants of the differences between the aggregate Solow residual and the technology index resulting from the aggregation of estimated sectoral technological growth. We show that starting in the mid nineties, there has been a deceleration in the aggregate growth rate of technology which is basically due to the behaviour of the manufacturing sectors. Finally, our results imply that aggregate technology growth is less volatile than aggregate productivity as measured by the Solow residual.     

R&D Investments, Information and Strategy

This paper argues that firms can best realize the value of their investments in R&D by exploiting the associated information asymmetries. Attention is directed away from the physical results of R&D and towards the firm's ability, more generally, to earn rents from the private information emanating from its R&D. Four strategies may be used to exploit the information asymmetries from R&D: (1) publish the details of the innovation in return for legal protection; (2) keep the information inside the firm; (3) make the information selectively, informally available to others; and (4) disseminate the information as widely and rapidly as possible. To implement these strategies, resources may be allocated both to the commercial development of new technologies, and/or to related market opportunities (investing in other companies, assets and technologies). Of critical importance are the innovator's own skills and resources in effectively gathering, understanding, and commercially exploiting R&D-generated information asymmetries, both internally and in relation to other firms. This study should yield new insights to managers in designing strategies (and counter-strategies) to position themselves not only at the technological edge, but more fundamentally, at the 'information edge'.     

Political construction and control of technology: wave-power renewable energy technologies

Recognizing that gouernment-sponsored research, development and demonstration (R,D&D) is a rentral factor in the construction of new technologies, this paper analyzes selected aspects of the relationships between government officials, 'private' businesses and technologists, within the process of technolog development. Building on precious zoork in the social construction of technology tradition for example, of Hughes, Pinch and Biker) and in technology policy and decision-making theoy (for example, of Collingridge and Morone and Woodhouse), and using the case of wave-power R&D in the UK; the paper identifies characteristics of embryonic technological artefacts and their institutional contexts which tend to bias the socio-political construction process. The key to the paper is the extent to which such distortions lead to unwise, uneconomical and/or unfair innovations or hinder learning about seemingly inflexible technologies, which could help to reduce their complexity, scale or cost.     

Primary energy substitution models: On the interaction between energy and society

This paper describes an attempt to develop a “synthetic” model of primary energy substitution, using certain rules which proved fruitful in describing the substitution of other commodities. This model will be used for forecasting, and for checking the validity of certain objectives set for R&D in the field of energy.     

Sectoral shocks and business cycles: a disaggregated analysis of output fluctuations in the UK

In this paper we first show that it is possible to modify linear real business cycle models to allow for disaggregate (industry-specific) factors in the generation of macroeconomic fluctuations. We then try to determine the relative importance of aggregate and sectoral shocks by doing principal components analysis on the residuals from a VAR of output growth rates in 19 UK industrial sectors. We find that a significant percentage of the innovations in sectoral output growths can be accounted for by a single unobserved component. However, since the model only sets an upper bound to the explanatory power of aggregate impulses, the importance of using sectoral data to extract additional information to bear on the analysis of economic fluctuations is confirmed by our findings.     

Technology Spillovers between Sectorsand over Time

Technology spillovers are an important source of economic growth. This article presents a new method to measure technology spillovers at the macroeconomic or sectoral level by means of a so-called technology flow matrix. The main novelty relative to existing technology flow matrices is that the matrix in this article provides insight into the time dimension of the spillover process. The matrix is used to assess whether or not R&D spillovers lead to a more equal distribution of technology investment over sectors.     

Export strategies in the computer industry: Japan and the USA

Japan's computer manufacturers realize that they need more than a new generation of software (or hardware) for success in world markets. The missing ingredients are primarily multinational busines experience factors, which have worked to the past advantage of US companies. Japan's past export successes — textiles, steel, consumer electronics—have come with products that, unlike computers, could be sold through existing distribution channels. Realizing their disadvantages in selling computer systems worldwide, the Japanese designed the heavily publicized fifth-generation project seeking technology that could serve as a wedge into markets where US-based multinationals had already become firmly entrenched. For this as for other joint government-industry R&D projects in Japan, the indirect effects will be at least as important as the technological outcomes; asking whether the fifth-generation project could have reached particular technical objectives poses the wrong question. In terms of technological capability, Japan could emerge as a formidable rival of the USA in world computer markets. Given the international presence of US companies large and small, this will not be as quick or as easy as in other Japanese export industries: Japan will continue to have far more difficulty exporting computer systems than VCRs or integrated circuits.     

Working hard in the wrong place: A mismatch-based explanation to the UK productivity puzzle

The UK experienced an unusually prolonged stagnation in labor productivity in the aftermath of the Great Recession. This paper analyzes the role of sectoral labor misallocation in accounting for this “productivity puzzle”. If jobseekers disproportionately search for jobs in sectors where productivity is relatively low, hires are concentrated in the wrong sectors, and the post-recession recovery in aggregate productivity can be slow. Our calculations suggest that, quantified at the level of three-digit occupations, this mechanism can explain up to two thirds of the deviations from trend-growth in UK labor productivity since 2007.     

Dynamics of sectoral business cycle comovement

Sectoral comovement accounts for a considerable share of the variance of aggregate variables. However, little is known about its time-varying aspects by now. In this article, a multivariate DCC- GARCH framework is employed to study dynamics of sectoral comovement across manufacturing sectors both in the United States and in Germany. To account for possible nonlinearities, asymmetric effects in conditional volatilities as well as in conditional correlations are being assessed. We find that comovement across sectors is not stable but shows irregular movements. Particularly, contractions tend to be more synchronized than expansions in manufacturing sector. Moreover, we examine the role of various aggregate factors for the fluctuations in conditional correlations. Our findings reveal that both the non-constant variability of common factors and the changes in the effects of these factors play role for the fluctuations in sectoral comovement.     

Sectoral Changes in Employment: An eclectic perspective on ‘good’ jobs and ‘poor’ jobs

The linkage Keynes established between the volume of employment that business firms require to make a particular number of jobs available provides an operational perspective about the way in which labor markets work. The aggregate supply or Z function is, in fact, a job offer curve. The most significant insight to derive from this curve is that job offers are inseparable from the economy's aggregate expenditure (or demand) level. This interdependency of aggregate supply and aggregate demand is necessary to understand the functioning of labor markets in the real world. This paper argues that a disaggregated model which encapsulates the economy's price-taking and price-making sectors offers a promising analytical tool to gain perspective about ‘good jobs’ and ‘poor jobs’ in post-Fordist economies. It is maintained that the sectoral deployment of workers reflects whether employing firms, as price-makers, can capture the increasing returns inherent in modern technology.     

International patent analysis as a tool for corporate technology analysis and planning

New, techniques of international patent anabsis are illustrated and resultsfrom preliminary validity tests of these techniques are presented. Indicators of technological activity, technological significance and commercial potential are constructed, and used to analyze fiber-based opto-electronic couplers and monoclonal-antibody-based diagnostic kits at the levels o f the technology, nation and firm. The international patent indicators are found to be closely correlated with R&D expenditures, scientific publications and new product introductions. They also relate to these indicators in ways that moke sense as specified in simple regression models of the innovation process. Comparisons of patent analysis results with expert opinion (for two process technologies) reveal that technology-level analyzes conform quite well with expert opinion, but national - and firm-level analyes vary from a low to a modest correlation with expert opinion. The authors conclude that the techniques can provide important information for corporate technology management, but that studies of additional technologies and further validity tests are needed.     

A tale of two states: Maharashtra and West Bengal

In this paper we study the decline of West Bengal relative to Maharashtra, historically two of the most important states of India. In 1960, West Bengal's per capita income exceeded that of Maharashtra, the third richest state at the time. By 1993, it had fallen to just 69 percent of Maharashtra's per capita income. We employ a “wedge” methodology based on the first order conditions of a multi-sector neoclassical growth model to ascertain the output and factor market sources of the divergent economic performances. Our diagnostic analysis reveals that a large part of West Bengal's development woes can be attributed to: (a) low sectoral productivity, especially in manufacturing and services; and (b) sectoral misallocation in labor markets between the manufacturing sector and the other sectors of the economy. We also present evidence on the labor market, the manufacturing sector, and public infrastructure that suggest a systematic worsening of the business environment in West Bengal during this period.