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This paper aims to understand the underlying mechanisms by which relational ties influence firm innovation. Companies in China rely much on relational ties to implement business strategies. Combining social network theory with dynamic capability perspective, we build a model that analyzes the direct and indirect impact of relational ties (business ties and service ties) on innovation performance through supply chain adaptability. We further analyze that technological turbulence and dysfunctional competition influence the relationships between relational ties and supply chain adaptability. We test these relationships using data collected from 300 manufacturers in China. The results show that service ties plays a relatively more important role than business ties in enhancing innovation performance directly. Interactions between business ties and service ties significantly influence innovation performance. Moreover, our results demonstrate that supply chain adaptability fully mediates the relationship between business ties and innovation performance but partially mediates the relationship between service ties and innovation performance. Our results show that technological turbulence positively moderates the relationships between business/service ties and supply chain adaptability. In addition, dysfunctional competition negatively moderates the relationship between business ties and supply chain adaptability. Overall, our findings contribute to the understanding of the roles of relational ties in supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on new institutional economics and the innovation literature, this paper examines how subnational institutions can impact corporate research and development (R&D) investment in emerging economies. The study further investigates a key contingency of this institutional effect: a firm's country/ownership identity. Using China's pharmaceutical sector as the empirical context, we find that the quality of subnational institutions, such as the degree of government deregulation and the effectiveness of local contracting institutions, has a significantly positive impact on corporate R&D intensity. Moreover, this institutional effect is more salient in indigenous firms and international joint ventures than in wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. This study serves to shed light on future research on how multifaceted subnational institutions shape innovation activities across different types of business organizations in emerging economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how interfirm variations in their in-licensed technology portfolios influence subsequent innovation performance. Existing studies mainly assume licensed technologies are homogeneously accessible to firms, and a prevailing explanation as to why firms vary in their innovation performance lies in differences of absorptive capacity. In this study, we intend to relax this assumption and use data about 186 Chinese indigenous firms to investigate how differences in in-licensing portfolios lead to different effects on innovation performance. We find that firms benefit from prior in-licensing technologies and the result is related to four dimensions of their licensing portfolios. We find that 1) the scale of firms’ technology in-licensing has an inverted-U relationship with their subsequent innovation performance; 2) firms that license-in foreign technologies tend to outperform those that predominantly license-in technologies from domestic sources; 3) the newness of firms’ technology in-licensing yields a positive effect on subsequent innovation performance; and 4) a diverse portfolio of licensors from whom technologies are licensed-in has an inverted-U relationship with firms’ subsequent technological diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]