Sustaining urban growth through innovative capacity : Beijing and Shanghai in comparison

The authors examine the diverse prospects of innovative sectors in Beijing and Shanghai using available indicators and data collected for this study through surveys. Beijing is the first choice for companies locating in China, but foreign employees prefer Shanghai for living convenience and cultural amenities. While Shanghai lags behind Beijing in knowledge creation and the generation of startup companies in the innovative sectors, it takes the lead in the commercialization of technological innovations and the development of creative cultural industries. The municipal authorities of Beijing and Shanghai have improved the innovation environment of the cities, but certain elements still stunt the growth of innovative industries, which cannot be removed easily. Three kinds of knowledge-intensive enterprises included in innovative sectors in the survey are high-tech manufacturers, knowledge-intensive business services, and creative content providers. The survey found that the clustering of the firms arose from the attraction of preferential policies and the purchase by governments or state-owned enterprises of information technology products. The survey shows that interaction among firms is inadequate in the knowledge-based industrial clusters in both Beijing and Shanghai. Hence, it may be some time before clustering leads to substantial gains in collective efficiency for innovative industry in Beijing and Shanghai.ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Water and Industry,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform

The determinants of regional specialisation in business services: agglomeration economies, vertical linkages and innovation

The article accounts for the determinants of sectoral specialisation in business services (BS) across the EU-27 regions as determined by: (i) agglomeration economies (ii) the region-specific structure of intermediate linkages (iii) technological innovation and knowledge intensity and (iv) the presence of these factors in neighbouring regions. The empirical analysis draws upon the REGIO panel database over the period 1999–2003. By estimating a Spatial Durbin Model, we find significant spatial effects in explaining regional specialisation in BS. Our findings show that, besides urbanisation economies, the spatial structure of intermediate sectoral linkages and innovation, in particular Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), are important determinants of specialisation in BS. The article contributes to the debate on the global versus local determinants of regional specialisation in BS by restating the importance of the regional sectoral structure besides that of urbanisation. We draw policy implications by rejecting the ‘footloose hypothesis’ for BS

Singapore as an innovative city in East Asia : an explorative study of the perspectives of innovative industries

The city-state of Singapore has achieved rapid economic development in the past by its positioning as an efficient business hub in Asia. To remain competitive in the global knowledge economy, however, Singapore needs to move beyond efficiency by developing a strong"innovative"edge as well. This paper examines the challenges that Singapore faces in seeking to do so through an explorative survey of 40 firms from three innovative sectors: high-tech manufacturing industries, knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS), and creative content industries. Overall, while the survey confirms Singapore's continuing competitive strength in efficiency infrastructure, it also finds a favorable perception of Singapore as an innovative city. Indeed, many of the industry actors indicated that an efficient business infrastructure is a prerequisite for locating their innovative activities in Singapore, suggesting that the relationship between innovation and efficiency is complementary, rather than substitutional. While the study found that intellectual property and its protection are widely recognized by actors in all three sectors, interesting differences exist. In particular, intellectual property protection appears to be of greater concern to the high-tech research and development-intensive manufacturing sector and the creative contents sector than to the KIBS sector. Another interesting difference is that while competition in high-tech innovation tends to be global, competition in creative content tends to have a stronger local or regional dimension. Public policy in East Asia has traditionally emphasized the development of technological innovation capabilities in the manufacturing sector. In light of the findings, public policymakers may need to be more sensitive to the nuanced differences in policies needed to promote the new creative content industries and the associated supporting KIBS.ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies

THE NEXUS BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND INNOVATION. A LITERATURE REVIEW

Knowledge management is the new managerial discipline whose aim is to support the processes of knowledge exploitation, memorization, re-use and learning. Therefore, it can be said that knowledge management has, implicitly or explicitly, a strong relationship with innovation management. Despite this fact, knowledge management and innovation management have developed into two separate fields and two distinct contexts of research. Starting from these assumptions, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the connection between knowledge management (KM) and innovation management has been developed in the last 10 years. In order to achieve our goal, an etic approach is employed which encompasses an external view of meaning associations and real-world events. The research combines the qualitative with the quantitative perspective and the whole multi-stage process is dominated by an inductive approach. The analysis focuses on 894 articles that were published in knowledge management and innovation journals, mostly indexed in Scopus and Thomson Reuters databases, during 2006 - 2016. The main results prove that there is a strong connection between KM and innovation management although the number of KM journals that approach topics related to innovation is higher than the number of innovation journals that focus on knowledge-related issues. The concept of "innovation" is by far the most used in the analyzed KM papers, while the term of "knowledge" is frequently used as a generic keyword in the Innovation papers; only a few papers are about a specific topic such as product development, project management, and process improvement - in the case of KM journals - or organizational learning, social capital, and human capital - in the case of Innovation journals. The research findings have both theoretical and practical implications. On the one hand, it synthesizes how the link between knowledge management and innovation management evolved in the last 10 years. On the other hand, it may serve as a handbook of managerial guidelines; it brings forward the knowledge management approaches and tools which can be used for product or process innovations

KNOWLEDGE INTENSIVE BUSINESS SERVICES (KIBS): BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS AND THEIR DIFFERENT BEHAVIORS IN THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE

This study analyzes scientific articles present in the databases Web of Science, Scopus and SciELO. Two hundred and thirty-five studies were examined, by using variations in bibliometrics. The main objective of this article is to analyze the set of studies that address the different behaviors Knowledge Intensive Business Services in the scientific literature. The results show a concentration of publications in the years 2005, 2010, 2012 and 2013, including the theme’s interdisciplinary perspective. Most studies are quantitative and were published in the last five years. The first study was presented at an international conference in the year 2000. The most quoted authors were Hertog, Miles, and Muller. The set of publications examined presents two groups of behaviors: roles and attributes of Knowledge Intensive Business Services. This research aimed to analyze Knowledge Intensive Business Services over time and contribute to its expansion in Brazil

A taxonomy of multi-industry labour force skills

This paper proposes an empirical study of the skill repertoires of 290 sectors in the United States over the period 2002–2011. We use information on employment structures and job content of occupations to flesh out structural characteristics of industry-specific know-how. The exercise of mapping the skills structures embedded in the workforce yields a taxonomy that discloses novel nuances on the organization of industry. In so doing we also take an initial step towards the integration of labour and employment in the area of innovation studies

Managing digital trasformation in the context of SMEs: The relevance of collaboration.

Industry 4.0 technologies are shaping the drivers of the competitive advantage. Firms, especially SMEs, are adopting these technologies facing barriers and difficulties toward the digitalization process. A strategy to overcome these barriers is to leverage on the collaboration with firm’s network of actors, in which a key role is represented by KIBS and technology providers. This thesis is focused on the impacts of Industry 4.0 for SMEs, the relevancy of collaboration and key role of technology providers and KIBS, analyzing the geographical dimension of these relationships, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.Industry 4.0 technologies are shaping the drivers of the competitive advantage. Firms, especially SMEs, are adopting these technologies facing barriers and difficulties toward the digitalization process. A strategy to overcome these barriers is to leverage on the collaboration with firm’s network of actors, in which a key role is represented by KIBS and technology providers. This thesis is focused on the impacts of Industry 4.0 for SMEs, the relevancy of collaboration and key role of technology providers and KIBS, analyzing the geographical dimension of these relationships, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives

Firms and Intellectual Property Rights: who, which, when and where

There is a large heterogeneity among firms in the use of IPRs. This thesis has focused on the use of types of IPRs that can be officially registered: patents, trademarks, design rights and breeders’ rights. The central research question addressed in this thesis is: How do firms employ different IPRs for innovation and growth purposes? To answer this question, it was decomposed into four sub-questions: 1. Who is filing IPRs? 2. Which IPRs do firms file? 3. When are IPRs filed? 4. Where are IPR filers located? The results of the research presented in the different chapters of the thesis provide answers to these sub-questions. 1. Who is filing IPRs? Chapter 2 presented results on the distribution of IPR filings across firms. A taxonomy of firms filing IPRs in terms of IPR variety and intensity revealed the most common filing practices across firms. This taxonomy distinguishes between five categories of firms: patent rookies, trademark rookies, IPR strategists, IPR specialists and IPR generalists. Another conclusion is that IPR filing strongly depends on both sector and firm size. IPRs are also filed by firms having capabilities necessary for successful innovation. The IPR literature provided evidence that different types of IPRs can be used as an indicator for the technological and commercialization capabilities present within a firm, region or country. These capabilities foster growth. Chapter 3 presented an analysis of the IPRs of scale-ups. The share of firms filing trademarks was much higher for the top 250 scale-ups than for other firms with similar sizes. Building on the literature on IPRs it can be argued that these trademark filings indicate that these firms stand out in their commercialization capabilities. 2. Which IPRs do firms file ? The results based on Dutch IPR filers presented in chapter 2 clearly confirmed statistics on IPRs which indicated that trademarks are by far the most widespread type of IPR filed by firms. About six times as many firms file trademarks as opposed to firms filing patents. Patents are filed by more firms than design and breeders’ rights. 3. When are IPRs filed? The results in chapter 3 indicated that scale-ups tend to file trademarks already at a young age. Instead, patents tend to be filed throughout the lifetime of scale-ups. In IPR literature trademarks are generally associated with downstream activities of the innovation process, such as the market introduction and successful commercialization of products and services. Chapter 4 presented evidence that, contrary to this assumption, trademarks are often filed during the early phases of the innovation process. There is a higher tendency towards early trademark filing by start-ups, for the purpose of radical innovation and when trademark filings are combined with patents. 4. Where are IPRs filers located? Scale-ups in the Netherlands, especially the top 250 fastest growing scale-ups and especially those in the Northern three provinces are more likely to file trademarks as compared to other firms. An analysis of the differences in the intensity of patent and trademark filings, done by firms across regions at NUTS 3-level in the Netherlands was presented in chapter 5. We interpreted these differences as a result of differences in the presence of specific capabilities within regions. Patent intensity signals the presence of technological capabilities whereas trademark intensity signals the presence of capabilities connected with commercialization activities. Not surprisingly, urbanized regions, where many firms with these capabilities are concentrated, tend to show higher patent and trademark filing intensities and therefore score higher on these capabilities than rural regions. These capabilities moderate the successful exploitation of opportunities for new economic pathways which foster regional economic resilience during an economic crisis