Motivations and barriers of foreign R&D activities in China

The continued growth of the Chinese economy accompanied with the expansion of international investment in China has led to an increase in foreign research and development (R&D) activities in the country. Aside from the rising importance of R&D internationalization, research on foreign R&D in China has been neglected in the past due to its emerging status. In this article we examine drivers and barriers for conducting R&D in China. The focus of our research is on transnational companies typically characterized by decentralized R&D activities. Our research is mainly based on qualitative interviews with senior R&D managers. The success of foreign R&D activities in China strongly depends on the realistic estimation of its advantages and the proper identification and handling of barriers.     

Information technology developments and implications for national policies

A review is made of the global status of information technology (IT) development and new opportunities identified for government IT policies. Despite operational problems, IT innovations continue apace. Poor human-computer interaction, user friendliness and lack of standardization are all key issues which must be addressed. Globalization trends, east-west politicomilitary changes and third world development, all have implications for government IT policies over the coming decade—and the right directions must be pursued now to derive real benefits from IT and move towards a true information economy.     

The antecedents of open business models: an exploratory study of incumbent firms

Firms engage increasingly in open business models. While most research has previously focused on typologies or challenges of open business models, their specific antecedents have not been studied so far. We use data from eight open business model cases to explore this question and identify five main antecedents of open business models: (1) business model inconsistency, (2) need to create and capture new value, (3) previous experience with collaboration, (4) open business model patterns, and (5) industry convergence. Based on openness characteristics from the existing literature, we differentiate four basic types of open business models and develop an initial understanding of the relevance of the identified antecedents for each of them. We thereby provide first guidelines for practitioners in choosing the right form of business model openness for their company.     

Defining Ownership: An empirical assessment of the ownership measures

Ownership is considered to be one of the crucial governance mechanisms; however, there have been no systematic attempts at validating the construct and measures used to operationalize ownership. We review the current understanding of ownership and the measures used by each perspective, namely blockholder/dispersed shareholder perspective, owner identity perspective, and aggregated ownership perspective. We thereafter critique each of these perspectives, offer hypotheses regarding their validity, and empirically assess each ownership measure vis‐à‐vis firm performance outcomes. We utilize a sample of 3,990 US firms to test our hypotheses and find no consistent results for the blockholder measure, or for the owner identity measure. However, the aggregated ownership measure consistently accounts for significant increases in explanation of variance in firm performance. Copyright © 2018 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

International innovation and strategic initiatives: A research agenda

Despite the argument that leveraging the expertise of foreign subsidiaries to the global firm benefits the whole firm's competitive advantage, in the case of international innovation, such leveraging rarely takes place. We investigate this paradox, applying research on strategic initiatives to the context of international R&D. Developing a conceptual model on the basis of communication psychology, we analyse how the innovative expertise of R&D subsidiaries may be leveraged to benefit the global firm. Specifically, we determine six elements whose greater exploration can lead to a deeper understanding of how the innovation expertise of a foreign R&D subsidiary may be leveraged.     

How managers protect intellectual property rights in China using de facto strategies

Foreign firms trying to protect their intellectual property rights (IPRs) in emerging economies are suffering real pressures because these economies usually offer little or no enforcement of IPR. Foreign firms therefore have to resort to approaches unlike those they use in developed countries. This paper explores what managers of foreign firms in China have already tried in their efforts to achieve effective IPR protection – specifically, they have crafted de facto strategies that can protect IPR without using China's legal system or engaging in lawsuits against imitators. These strategies work, and this paper explains how and why, thus offering a potential template for IPR protection in other economies with weak appropriability systems.     

Beyond listening: the distinct effects of proactive versus responsive customer orientation on the reduction of uncertainties at the fuzzy front end of innovation

The extent to which the intensity of R&D employees' interaction with market-oriented employees, proactive customer orientation, and responsive customer orientation affect the ability to reduce product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end of innovation was analyzed. They investigated 160 product innovation projects in various high-tech industries and identified proactive customer orientation as an important moderator of the link between R&D employees' interaction with market-oriented employees and the reduction of product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end. They also found that responsive customer orientation diminishes the ability to reduce product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed.     

Towards an attention‐based view of technology decisions

The importance of technology decisions is widely acknowledged in both research and practice. However, we know little about how companies structure technology decisions from an organizational point of view and how attention is distributed in the course of the decision process in order to identify, process, and transfer information between the organizational units involved. Using the attention‐based view of the firm and 14 qualitative case studies, we present five approaches for organizing technology decisions: (1) centralized decision‐making, (2) busy information bee, (3) double‐blind analysis, (4) moderated expert panel, and (5) coterie approach. On this ground, this paper introduces a new, attention‐based view on technology decisions, which improves the theoretical understanding of organizations and provides guidelines for practitioners in choosing an appropriate organizational configuration in this regard.     

Household internal and external electricity contract switching in EU countries

Using a representative sample of more than 13,000 households from eight countries in the European Union (EU), this article empirically studies the factors related to household electricity contract switching by distinguishing between internal switchers (households that switched contracts but stayed with the same supplier) from external switchers (households that switched to a new supplier). The econometric analysis includes individual preferences, household structural factors and socio-demographic characteristics, as well as electricity market characteristics. The study explicitly explores the role of risk and time preferences on switching behaviours, with risk and time preferences elicited through incentivized experiments as well as self-assessment scales. The main results suggest that internal and external switching are not related to the same factors, that risk and time preferences affect switching behaviours, and that renters are less likely to switch than homeowners; further, electricity market characteristics are found to affect household electricity contract switching.     

Technologically Reflective Individuals as Enablers of Social Innovation*

This paper identifies technologically reflective individuals and demonstrates their ability to develop innovations that benefit society. Technological reflectiveness (TR) is the tendency to think about the societal impact of an innovation, and those who display this capability in public are individuals who participate in online idea competitions focused on technical solutions for social problems (such as General Electric's eco‐challenge, the James Dyson Award, and the BOSCH Technology Horizon Award). However, technologically reflective individuals also reflect in private settings (e.g., when reading news updates), thus requiring a scale to identify them. This paper describes the systematic development of an easy‐to‐administer multi‐item scale to measure an individual's level of TR. Applying the TR scale in an empirical study on a health monitoring system confirmed that individuals' degree of TR relates positively to their ability to generate (1) more new product features and uses, (2) features with higher levels of societal impact, and (3) features that are more elaborated. This scale allows firms seeking to implement co‐creation in their new product development (NPD) process and sustainable solutions to identify such individuals. Thus, this paper indicates that companies wishing to introduce new technological products with a positive societal impact may profit from involving technologically reflective individuals in the NPD process.