Search

How do global value chains (GVCs) affect a firm's innovation impact? Working as international communities, GVCs are rich in knowledge and resource interchange. The prior literature has focused on knowledge absorbing or internal knowledge transfer within firms for in-house innovation. However, scant research has focused on promoting innovation across interfirm networks in a GVC context. This article develops a new concept of interfirm transformative capacity as a firm's ability to transfer developed technology knowledge across time, space, and firm networks. In this article, we explore three mechanisms of interfirm transformative capacity in GVCs: 1) choosing knowledge intermediaries, 2) transmitting and maintaining knowledge over time and space, and 3) reactivating and synthesizing knowledge. We predict that engagement in a lead firm's GVC, structural holes, and network centrality will affect a focal firm's innovation impact as a result of interfirm transformative capacity. Integrator suppliers have higher innovation impacts than modular suppliers. To test these three mechanisms, we build a novel dataset from a five-year panel of Apple suppliers and their patent impacts. The results support our hypotheses related to the mechanisms of interfirm transformative capacity. Our theoretical elaboration and empirical findings have significant implications for innovation policy within, and governance of, GVCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this special section focus on the ability to integrate evolving incubator models into the organization. Management and organizational science focusing on the complex process of R&D that leads to the subsequent commercialization has come a long way since the days of post-World War II industrial and research laboratories. In this context, the evolution of the incubator can be retraced from the foundational research in the 1950s and 1960s of Researchon-Research—that explored the R&D process in a number of settings to derive and test theories of organization behavior. Since then, we have seen a concentration of research and practice that have spanned a burgeoning range of incubators models and entities that, in some manner, exist to play a role to support and harness new technology-based start-ups. For more than half a century, these third-party entities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem have spread from the United States to Europe and are a well-established worldwide phenomenon. Business incubators have been largely viewed as an essential means to facilitating the process of knowledge transfer and tech-based commercialization through the provision of office infrastructure, laboratories and equipment, business support services, mentoring, and access to entrepreneurial finance and specialist networks for the founders of these embryonic start-ups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms engaged in university–industry collaboration (UIC) desire to advance knowledge and new technologies with their academic partners, however the performance of knowledge creation and transfer is greatly affected by complementarity and compatibility between the firm and academic institute. In practice, many firms assess the appropriateness of academic partners using a broad range of criteria, with high subjectivity. This paper therefore seeks to address this challenge by introducing a systematic approach to help firms determine the appropriateness of academic partners, represented as “matching quality” in this paper. Three facets of matching quality are examined: complementarity of research ability, compatibility in business mindset, and compatibility in relationships. This paper proposes a framework and model for assessing matching quality, along with a case study to demonstrate how the proposed model works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we have any hope of achieving sustainability, we, as researchers, need to develop a new perspective on universities and multistakeholder engagement. Stakeholder theory teaches us that engaging stakeholders in specific transactions and interactions can foster the sustainable development. But solving the grand challenge of sustainability requires more. Universities need to see themselves as part of a great network of stakeholders where interactions, knowledge, and data management go beyond the entrepreneurial university paradigm. Hence, in this article, we present Oztel's concept of a fourth-generation university as a launch-point for broadening the discourse on higher education's third mission. We establish a new stream of inquiry through four main propositions for research and technology management. Further, we call for interested scholars to pioneer this field with an inexhaustive list of potential avenues for future research. University managers, researchers, and policymakers should find great insights into the future evolution of sustainable development and its soon-to-be intrinsic place in the fabric of teaching, research, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]