Impacts of the Japanese patent system on productivity growth

We investigate empirically how the Japanese patent system has affected post-war growth in Japanese total factor productivity. The system has been criticized for several reasons, including that it encourages numerous filings of narrow claims that build incrementally on fundamental technologies developed by domestic and foreign inventors. Stated in different terms, the system was designed to promote technological catch-up and diffusion through incremental innovation. However, its effectiveness in achieving this purpose has not been studied systematically. We provide econometric evidence that the technology diffused through the Japanese patent system had a significant and positive impact on Japan's technical progress.     

Commentary on leveraging knowledge based resources: The role of contracts

The commentary first discusses the main argument of Mouzas and Ford. The commentary then addresses how contracts can be understood in business networks by relating the concept to the three main IMP models. The conclusion is that the article is an important step in linking ideas of business contracts and resource interaction in relational settings. Mouzas and Ford examine how contracts are used to leverage knowledge based resources through interaction with other idiosyncratically capable firms. In particular, they empirically investigate the use of umbrella contracts as manifestations of joint consent in manufacturer — retailer relationships as a specific form of contract for this purpose. The authors take an industrial networks perspective, making (forms of) contracts resources within a relational, interactive frame of exchange. This in itself is valuable, as contracts in an industrial networks perspective may easily be viewed as one out of many contextual parameters to transactions carried out within business relationships. There are three general models or frameworks in IMP that may be used to analyse the role of contracts within an interactive and relational frame of exchange. These are the interaction model (Håkansson, 1982), the actors-resources-activities (ARA) model (Håkansson & Snehota, 1995) and the 4 resource model (Håkansson & Håkansson and Waluszewski, 2002).     

Pass-Through by Multi-Product Firms

How does cost pass-through to prices depend on the set of products a multi-product firm owns? Using a structural demand model for the Swedish beer market, we simulate equilibrium cost pass-through for varying counterfactual ownership patterns. We find that a firm with a larger number of products in its portfolio and a higher degree of substitutability among these products adopts a lower pass-through of costs. While the direction of results is robust, our simulations show that the muting effect on pass-through is limited when comparing pass-through by stand-alone firms to pass-through under the actual, moderately concentrated market structure.     

International collaboration and innovation: Evidence from a leading Chinese multinational enterprise

This paper investigates the impact of international collaboration and its characteristics on the quality of the innovation of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in emerging markets. Using a unique dataset of 1428 international and comparable domestic collaboration projects over the 2010–2016 period, it finds that while international innovation collaborations are associated with high innovation quality, cultural distance has a negative effect on collaboration outcomes. Moreover, proximity to the focal firm's overseas R&D centres and the size of expenditure budgets play significant moderating roles in overcoming cultural barriers. Based on the RBV and dynamic capabilities theory, we investigate how firms from emerging markets can acquire these two crucial requisites for innovation. The characteristics of partners and intellectual property (IP) arrangements are also found to have a significant impact on the quality of innovations.     

民营科技企业创新绩效分析与评价

创新绩效评价是一项对企业创新的效果与效率进行监督管理的新制度，这种制度在经济发达国家已有一定的实践，但在我国却鲜有研究。本文首先根据我国民营科技企业的发展现状，论证了对民营科技企业进行创新绩效评价的必要性，然后设计了民营科技企业创新绩效评价的指标体系，最后对安徽省按地区统计的民营科技企业创新绩效进行了实证研究。