Foreign Direct Investments in Business Services: Transforming the Visegrád Four Region into a Knowledge-based Economy?

Foreign direct investments (FDIs) in the service sector are widely attributed an important role in bringing more skill-intensive activities into the Visegrad Four (V4). This region—comprising Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia—relied heavily on FDIs in manufacturing, which was often found to generate activities with limited skill content. This contribution deconstructs the chaotic concept of “business services” by analysing the actual nature of service sector activities outsourced and offshored to the V4. Using the knowledge-based economy (KBE) as a benchmark, the paper assesses the potential of service sector outsourcing in contributing to regional competitiveness by increasing the innovative capacity. It also discusses the role of state policies towards service sector FDI (SFDI). The analysis combines data obtained from case studies undertaken in service sector outsourcing projects in V4 countries. Moreover, it draws on interviews with senior employees of investment promotion agencies and publicly available data and statistics on activities within the service sector in the region. It argues that the recent inward investments in business services in the V4 mainly utilize existing local human capital resources, and their contribution to the development of the KBE is limited to employment creation and demand for skilled labour

Changing perspectives on the internationalization of R&D and innovation by multinational enterprises: a review of the literature

Internationalization of R&D and innovation by Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) has undergone a gradual and comprehensive change in perspective over the past 50 years. From sporadic works in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, it became a systematically analysed topic in the 1970s, starting with pioneering reports and “foundation texts”. Our review unfolds the theoretical and empirical evolution of the literature from dyadic interpretations of centralization versus decentralization of R&D by MNEs to more comprehensive frameworks, wherein established MNEs from Advanced Economies still play a pivotal role, but new players and places also emerge in the global generation and diffusion of knowledge. Hence views of R&D internationalization increasingly rely on concepts, ideas and methods from IB and other related disciplines such as industrial organization, international economics and economic geography. Two main findings are highlighted. First, scholarly research pays an increasing attention to the network-like characteristics of international R&D activities. Second, different streams of literature have emphasized the role of location- specific factors in R&D internationalization. The increasing emphasis on these aspects has created new research opportunities in some key areas, including inter alia: cross-border knowledge sourcing strategies, changes in the geography of R&D and innovation, and the international fragmentation of production and R&D activities

The voyage of the beagle into innovation: explorations on heterogeneity, selection, and sectors

The aim of the paper is to assess heterogeneity of the innovation process. Using exploratory factor analysis on micro data from the third Community Innovation Survey in 13 countries, we identify four patterns that can be interpreted as research, user, external, and production ingredients of innovation. All too often it is assumed that how firm innovate can be represented by differences across sectors and/or countries. To put this proposition under scrutiny, we partition variability of the factors scores into components identified by these higher levels. Sectors and countries matter to a certain extent, but far more of the variance is given by heterogeneity among firms within both of them. However, groups of firms produced by cluster analysis account for much higher share of the variance, which indicates that the most relevant stratification of the data cuts across the established sectoral and national boundaries. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding of selection in evolutionary economics and for the literature on innovation systems

Researchers' institutional mobility: bibliometric evidence on academic inbreeding and internationalization

We propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on data from the Dimensions database and Global Research Identifier Database. We use researchers' first and last affiliations to estimate the extent authors have moved across institutions as well as countries. For each institution, we quantify the shares of researchers with the same affiliation (insiders), those who came from another institution within the country (domestic outsiders), and those coming from a different country (foreign outsiders). Institutions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have the highest share of insiders, whereas institutions in Northern America and Western and Northern Europe have a higher share of foreign outsiders. Foreign outsiders are most common in small and wealthy countries. No disciplinary differences are observed, as captured by the field classification scheme of Dimensions.Merit, Expertise and Measuremen

Researchers' institutional mobility: bibliometric evidence on academic inbreeding and internationalization

We propose institutional mobility indicators based on researchers' mobility flows in 22 major fields of science across 1,130 Leiden Ranking institutions from 64 countries. We base our indicators on data from the Dimensions database and Global Research Identifier Database. We use researchers' first and last affiliations to estimate the extent authors have moved across institutions as well as countries. For each institution, we quantify the shares of researchers with the same affiliation (insiders), those who came from another institution within the country (domestic outsiders), and those coming from a different country (foreign outsiders). Institutions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe have the highest share of insiders, whereas institutions in Northern America and Western and Northern Europe have a higher share of foreign outsiders. Foreign outsiders are most common in small and wealthy countries. No disciplinary differences are observed, as captured by the field classification scheme of Dimensions