Subsidiary roles as determinants of subsidiary technology sourcing: empirical evidence from China

Emerging economies have become new destinations for knowledge sourcing, forcing Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) to reconfigure their global innovation strategies and structure. While foreign subsidiaries located in emerging economies were conventionally viewed as having market or efficiency seeking roles, they have started to evolve towards knowledge-seeking roles. We argue that the conventional wisdom shall be reassessed considering this recent shift. We empirically investigate 129 manufacturing MNE subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies in China, in terms of their roles and sources of technology. Our results indicate that market and knowledge seeking subsidiaries located in China tend to have a positive impact on the generation of new knowledge, either through locally established MNE R&D laboratories or through collaborations with local firms and scientific institutions

Public procurement for innovation to help meet societal challenges: a review and case study

Public procurement for innovation (PPI) is a powerful, underutilized demand-side innovation policy instrument. How this instrument can contribute to meeting societal challenges, which require goal-oriented transformation of socio-technical systems, remains unclear and is explored in this article. This article draws on the transitions and PPI literature to propose transformative processes to which PPI can contribute and identifies factors that determine the effectiveness of PPI in meeting societal challenges. The propositions are explored with a case study on the procurement of radically new flood barrier technology, using event history mapping analysis. The article concludes that, under certain conditions, PPI can contribute to the transformative processes of (1) the articulation of societal demands to direct challenge-driven transformation; (2) the development and production; (3) selection; and (4) the diffusion and use of new technologies to meet these societal demands. The article ends with policy recommendations on how PPI can help meet societal challenges