Services as drivers of economic growth. Is there an opportunity for Latin America countries?

ABSTRACT

Considering the recent improvements in services innovation and productivity performance, the aim of the article is to analyze if they can act as a new growth driver for Latin American countries. For that, we review the literature on services and structural change in two stages. First, we apply a bibliometric methodology to identify the main trends in literature. Second, we analyze in-depth a smaller set of papers in order to extract the main lessons regarding three aspects of our question: (i) services and productivity growth, (ii) new opportunities for innovation in services and (iii) relation between services and manufacturing through servitization process. The results show that productivity and innovation growth in services are concentrated in only a few branches. Besides this, services performance depends on their links with manufacturing activities. We conclude that the current Latin American servitization process clausure opportunities for developing instead of opening them.     

政府质量、科技创新与绿色GDP——中国省际空间溢出效应及区域差异对比

通过构建嵌入政府质量和科技创新因素的经济增长模型，利用中国30个省份2004~2017年的平衡面板数据，实证检验政府质量、科技创新对绿色GDP发展的影响。研究发现：中国绿色GDP存在显著的空间集聚性及明显的区域差异性。在经济权重矩阵影响下，不同地区的政府效率、市场化程度、公平程度和腐败程度对绿色GDP的影响不同，其中政府效率、公平程度能有效促进经济发展较好地区的绿色GDP增长，却会抑制比较落后地区绿色GDP的增长；市场化程度对大部分地区绿色GDP呈现促进作用；腐败程度对地区绿色GDP增长呈阻碍作用。科技创新对各地区绿色GDP均起到积极的促进作用。因此，提升绿色GDP发展水平不仅需要提高地方政府质量，为绿色GDP发展提供符合实际的政策指导意见，还需激活企业科技创新能力，为绿色GDP发展提供有力科技保障。     

Open Innovation in Emerging Markets: A Business Model Perspective

There has been significant contribution to the management literature on open innovation and partnership strategy, detailing their nature and impact in a wide range of business environments. However, “strategic positioning” of the business model based on their interactions with other business entities has not received enough academic attention despite its implications for the new generation of start-ups in emerging markets who do not have any prior business models to emulate. This research conceptualizes a framework that would help strategists position their firm in the market by carefully analyzing its interactions with other business and social entities in the business eco-system.     

GMO-free regions in Europe: an analysis of diffusion patterns

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been a controversial issue in the European Union (EU). A growing number of member states and regions within the member states oppose the EU’s agro-biotechnology policy, resulting in a complex multi-level structure of policy-making. This study is interested in the regional opposition to GMOs and scrutinises the determinants of membership in the European Network of GMO-free Regions. In terms of theory, this study builds on the literature of policy diffusion. For the analytical purpose, we distinguish among four diffusion mechanisms: learning from earlier adopters, economic competition among proximate regions, imitation of economically powerful regions and deviation from national law. Our research questions are the following: How has membership developed since the foundation of the network? Which mechanisms explain the diffusion patterns observed? The empirical findings show that membership in the network has grown substantially between 2003 and 2014, which supports the general expectation that there is a diffusion of GMO-free regions. Yet, most new member regions are located in the same member states as the regions that founded the network. In other words, what is observed is intra-country diffusion rather than inter-country diffusion. The empirical findings provide support for the importance of learning from earlier adopters for the growing of the European Network of GMO-free Regions.     

Expanding airport capacity of cities under uncertainty: Strategies to mitigate congestion

Airport capacity constraints are increasingly challenging the growth of air traffic. At the same time, decision-making about airport capacity investments is extremely complex, involving trade-offs. This paper’s objective is to optimise a privately owned airport system’s capacity investment decision in a city under demand uncertainty. Next to the investment size, our real options model incorporates the timing of the investment, as well as the cost of congestion. The results reveal that the larger a city’s initial airport capacity, the smaller its investment will relatively be and the lower the occupancy rate threshold at which investment will take place. We also show that, in case of a higher demand growth combined with more demand uncertainty, the city will benefit from a significantly larger investment, but made later at a higher occupancy rate. In this case, cities with a small initial capacity will sometimes even more than double current capacity. Higher airport charges and an increase in non-aeronautical revenues both lead to a later investment in more capacity, due to the increased project attractiveness. An increase in congestion costs results in a larger investment made earlier, in order to eliminate delays. Airport operational cost and capacity holding cost increases both lead to smaller investments.     

Study of emerging air taxi network operation using discrete-event systems simulation approach

This research focuses on understanding the air taxi operations to determine the number of air taxis required to fulfill the demand for urban air mobility in New York City (NYC). We leverage the Define, Measure, Analyze, Design, and Verify (DMADV) framework and integrate it with the systems simulation approach. Upon investigation, we find that all the parameters linearly impact the vehicle utilization, while other measures are robust, specifically with respect to the seating capacity. It is also recommended to operate initially with 70 air taxis in NYC to achieve a trade-off between customer wait time and vehicle utilization. The proposed approach can act as a recommender system for air taxi companies.     

Marketing capabilities and innovation. How do they affect the financial results of hotels?

From the point of view of firms’ managers, the knowledge of the factors which explain their firms’ financial results is considered of great usefulness to propose the most appropriate and profitable marketing strategies and actions. This research sets out from this central idea and proposes a model of relationships that considers the marketing results, the marketing capabilities, and the innovation capability as key factors for achieving good financial results. This model is verified via an empirical investigation carried out among 200 directors of hotel establishments in Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain which is one of the country's main tourist destinations. The results indicate that innovation capability is strongly conditioned by marketing capabilities and resources and that this innovation capability affects the financial results of the firms analyzed. Likewise, it is deduced that a market-oriented management philosophy contributes to the development of these marketing capabilities. The implications for management are considered very relevant as they must lead these firms to invest in the development of marketing resources and capabilities, and apply a market-oriented management philosophy if they wish to improve their financial results.     

DIY: How internationalization shifts the locus of indigenous innovation for Chinese firms

We elaborate theories of indigenous innovation by explaining how internationalization choices help emerging market firms transition from dependence on external knowledge to self-reliance on internal knowledge. Using a 1998–2007 census dataset of Chinese manufacturing firms, we theorize and test the moderation effect of foreign equity and export orientation on the relationship between knowledge and indigenous innovation. We show that foreign equity dis-incentivizes, while export orientation incentivizes, investments in internal knowledge. We contribute by showing that internationalization choices may radically change indigenous innovation outcomes by shifting the locus of problem solving outside or inside the firm. Our study corroborates the negative direct and indirect effects of external knowledge on indigenous innovation at the firm level previously suggested by China-centric scholars but also shows how two types of internationalization choices may gradually relieve firm-level dependence on imported technology. We bridge the gap between Western research and Chinese thought and practice by introducing a do-it-yourself (DIY) explanation of how firms may implement China’s indigenous innovation (zizhu chuangxin) policy.     

悬臂式掘进机回转机构的分析与建模

基于悬臂式掘进机回转机构的结构特点,对其液压控制系统的运行原理展开分析,并结合假设条件建立液压元件的基本方程,通过机理建模最后得到了系统的传递函数,为实现掘进机自动控制提供了实用的简化模型。     

Which factors hinder the adoption of open innovation in SMEs?

The literature on open innovation (OI) is characterised by studies based both on large companies and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Among all, one of the less explored issues in SMEs is what impedes them to adopt OI. Thus, this paper has the threefold objective to identify which factors hinder the adoption of OI in SMEs, to investigate if different behaviours exist among SMEs in relation to these factors, and to understand if the same factors effectively influence the level of adoption of OI. Based on a survey on 157 Italian SMEs, we identified four main barriers (namely, ‘knowledge’, ‘collaboration’, ‘organisational’, and ‘financial and strategic’) and three profiles of firms, different in terms of innovativeness of the industries they belong to (knowledge intensive, medium-innovative, and less innovative) and hampering factors perceived (‘knowledge’, ‘financial and strategic’, and ‘collaboration’ and ‘organisational’ barriers). Moreover, we found that some of these factors effectively impede the adoption of the paradigm.