The influence of patent protection on firm innovation investment in manufacturing industries

Countries enact various mechanisms, such as patent protection, to encourage, protect, and reward firm innovation. The degree to which these mechanisms afford firms protection over their intellectual property influences the innovation strategy that firms pursue and innovation investments they make. To date, empirical evidence on the relationship between patent protections and firm innovation is lacking, despite the relationship being the subject of intense theoretical and policy debate. To further consider the influences on firm innovation, we test the influence of a country's patent rights and changes in them on firm-level investment in innovation. Data for 706 firms competing in ten manufacturing industries across 29 countries were gathered and analyzed. Even after controlling for various firm, industry, and national factors, there is a strong positive influence of patent rights and changes in patent rights on a firm's propensity to invest in innovation. In addition, we consider the sensitivity of this result to alternative measures of patent and other intellectual property protection. We also find that the influence of patent rights on firm-level innovation varies across industries for example, the impact appears greatest in the scientific instruments and industrial chemicals industries.     

知识产权保护对经济增长的作用研究

实证研究加强知识产权保护是否会促进经济增长。论述知识产权保护与R&D活动以及国际贸易的交互作用,分析其在国家经济增长中发挥的作用,并确定采用R&D知识存量作为R&D活动的代理变量,采用进出口总额占GDP的比重作为国际贸易的代理变量,基于柯布道-格拉斯生产函数构建理论模型,基于影响因素分析推导并建立实证回归模型;依据传统的永续盘存法分别测算固定资本存量和R&D知识存量,利用1980年至2005年27个发达国家和22个发展中国家的面板数据,采用固定效应与随机效应相结合的方法,检验知识产权保护对经济增长的影响效果。实证研究结果表明,加强知识产权保护对经济增长有正向的促进作用,加强知识产权保护和扩大国际贸易对经济增长的促进作用显著,加强知识产权保护和R&D活动对经济增长的促进作用不显著。     

What Risks Are Chinese People Concerned About?

The aim of this study is to investigate public perceived risk on various issues in present-day China. Two surveys were conducted in urban China in 1996 and 1998. In the first survey, risk perceptions of different occupational groups are compared. Gender differences within each occupational group are also analyzed. In the second survey, participants with diverse employment status were recruited. The overall risk rankings of both surveys indicate great concern with risks that threaten national stability and economic development, and less concern with high-technology risk such as threat from a nuclear power plant. It is also found that employees from high-profit firms are more concerned about macroscopic catastrophic risks, whereas laid-off workers and employees from money-losing enterprises are more concerned about daily life or self-concerned risks. The importance of actual exposure to risk, mass media coverage, culture, and psychometric dimensions are discussed.     

Workforce Age and Innovation: A Literature Survey

The relationship between age and creative performance has been found to follow a hump‐shaped profile in the arts and sciences, and in great technological achievement. Accordingly, accelerating workforce aging raises concern about whether future capacity to innovate is endangered. This paper provides a literature survey and critical discussion of existing studies exploring the effects of age on innovative performance, both at the individual and the firm level. However, as individual‐level evidence and some of the firm‐level studies are of purely cross‐sectional nature, the existing results have to be interpreted with caution owing to the presence of selectivity biases and unobserved heterogeneity. Studies at the aggregate level of firms address some of these issues. In particular, the scarce longitudinal evidence reveals that it is very likely that older workers fare much better in innovation than previous cross‐sectional evidence suggests. Moreover, up to now, the literature survey does not find conclusive evidence that a youth‐centred human resource strategy (always) fosters innovation. Apart from integrating the existing empirical evidence on different levels of aggregation, a strong focus of this paper is on methodological challenges in the empirical study of workforce age and innovation and it aims to offer a sound conceptual and methodological basis for further studies in this field of management research.     

High value manufacturing: Capability,appropriation, and governance

Manufacturing competitiveness is on many policy agendas, born out of a concern for firms in high-cost economies finding themselves outcompeted by low-cost rivals. Government policy makers and manufacturing firm strategists have put their faith in what we label as high value manufacturing (HVM). We see HVM as an incipient phenomenon currently in a situation of prescience, as something that is still “in-the-making,” with manufacturing firms trying to find ways to be able to step away from having to compete on price. This paper consults relevant strategy theories with the purpose to pinpoint the issues and problems that need to be accommodated for bringing HVM into being and for creating the effects that are anticipated. We found that HVM must be seen as a distributed activity, thus realizing complex functionality for a system-of-use, while being subjected to path constitution. For HVM to function, the firms involved need to find solutions to the capability problem, the appropriation problem, and the governance problem. We suggest that further research needs to involve itself in problem-solving activity to assist in bringing HVM about while simultaneously further developing strategy theory geared toward firms that are involved in a distributed activity like HVM.     

A challenging marketplace for venture capital

This article looks at the contemporary situation facing the U.K. venture capital industry as it enters its second decade of activity. After 10 years of substantial growth, the industry is starting to mature. Accordingly, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, U.K. venture capital firms are having to address seriously strategic issues of product and market choice in order to meet the high investment expectations placed on them by their funders. There is evidence that the industry is already concentrating its finances into a small number of larger firms. It is likely that these better resourceed firms will have material advantages in initiating both product and market innovations. However, this concentration is unlikely to improve the supply of venture capital funds to start-up and other early stage, high risk ventures.     

职工薪酬分配比例、产权性质与企业价值

随着现代企业的发展，职工在企业中扮演的角色越来越重要，职工激励问题对企业的重要性也不言而喻。已有研究主要集中于薪酬和期权等绝对激励，关于职工激励对企业的影响程度的研究则较少。 利用2003年至2013年中国上市公司数据，基于公平理论构建职工薪酬分配比例与企业价值关系的OLS模型，对职工薪酬分配比例对企业价值的影响进行实证检验。 研究结果表明，全样本中职工薪酬分配比例越高，企业价值越低；区分产权性质后，国有企业薪酬分配比例明显高于民营企业，继续提高国有企业薪酬分配比例会降低国有企业价值，民营企业薪酬分配比例仍有提升空间；行业收入较高会弱化提高薪酬分配比例带来的激励作用；劳动密集度会提高薪酬分配比例带来的激励作用；薪酬分配比例显著影响企业价值，产权性质、行业收入差距和劳动密集度影响薪酬分配比例与企业价值的关系。研究结论在用工具变量和外生事件考虑二者的内生性问题后仍然成立。 研究结果丰富了企业价值的影响因素和薪酬契约激励经济后果方面的研究，也为职工薪酬分配比例对企业价值的影响提供了新的经验证据，同时对上市公司制定合理的薪酬激励政策和中国当前提高劳动分配比例的政策具有重要的借鉴意义。建议监管者在制定薪酬管制政策时应根据公司的实际情况(如产权性质和非货币性福利等)对不同的公司进行监管，以促进企业发展。     

Do third-party certifications work in a weak institutional environment?

We investigate whether third-party certification may negatively affect firm performance in a weak institutional environment. Firms in weak institutional environments often obtain certifications to appeal to foreign audiences. But these audiences hold negative evaluations of firms from weak institutional settings, judging them as being of poor quality due to their geographic origin. We argue that these negative evaluations greatly diminish the informational value of certifications, such that the costs of certification exceed revenue gains causing performance decline. We also examine whether industry-level evaluations can challenge country-level ones. Focusing on industry legitimation, we argue that this increases the salience of the industry over the institutional context. Audiences see the industry first, not the weak institutional environment. Thus, third-party certifications can become a basis for differentiating among firms and thereby help improve firm performance as industry legitimation increases. We use the first decade post-liberalization of the Indian software industry, 1992–2003, to test our hypotheses. Based on a sample of 792 firms, we find support for our arguments suggesting that in weak institutional environments certification alone is not enough for firms targeting foreign audiences to overcome the stigma of their origins; it needs to be accompanied by positive industry-level processes.     

Building Industry–University Research Centers: Some Strategic Considerations

This paper reviews the importance of industry–university relationships and the strategic considerations within the context of these partnerships in university research centers. We have identified several factors that are particularly important to industry in building relationships with university centers. These include: acquiring skills, knowledge and gaining access to university facilities; organizational cultures that are more organic; flexible university policies for intellectual property rights, patents and licenses; and the presence of champions. Firms also have explicit collaborative strategies for partnering with universities where firms can be segmented into three distinct clusters: Collegial Players, Aggressive Players and Targeted Players. Collegial Players are often large firms working with universities and university-sponsored consortia on topics of interest that have long-term value rather than promise immediate commercial opportunities. Aggressive Players are both large and small firms who employ university relationships specifically to develop and commercialize a wide range of marketable products and services. Targeted Players are often smaller firms, largely interested in using university relationships to address specific issues central to their business. We conclude by discussing key implications for both industry and universities.     

Climate change,consumer lifestyles and legitimation strategies of sustainability-oriented firms

This study explores the links between climate change, consumer lifestyles, and legitimation strategies of sustainable firms. Our findings offer new insight into this under-researched area based on qualitative case studies of four Nordic firms operating in industrial and consumer contexts. We find that climate change consciousness is a major driver for all case firms’ sustainability-focused operations, but the dynamics differed. Achieving sociopolitical legitimacy emerges as an important factor for the case firms operating in the energy sector, especially as it connects to government incentives and regulative pressures. However, cognitive legitimacy is increasingly important for them also, and the firms are trying to connect to their consumers’ lifestyles as well. In turn, for the case firms operating in the consumer (clothing) industry, functionality and the use of products are highlighted even though cognitive legitimacy based on linking to their consumers’ lifestyle is visible. Finally, the findings reveal that despite the sustainable lifestyles are increasingly important and better recognized in firm strategies and practices, other practicalities of running the business successfully in a highly competitive marketplace are relevant. Building legitimacy in such a way that captures and justifies different approaches, therefore, emerges as the connecting factor between the changing consumer behavior and pro-environmental firm practices.     

Success Traps,Dynamic Capabilities and Firm Performance

Dynamic capabilities (DCs) are fundamental to the understanding of differential firm performance. However, the question remains why some firms are better at developing and applying DCs than others. In particular, successful firms have been warned against the tendency to fall into a success or competence trap, where success reinforces exploitation of existing competences and crowds out exploration of new competences, hindering the development of DCs. Therefore, this study examines the effects of success traps on DCs and consequently firm performance, taking into account firm strategy and market dynamism. To facilitate this, our study also identifies the commonalities of DCs across firms. Drawing on survey data from 113 UK high‐tech small and medium‐sized firms, we find that success traps have a significant, strong negative effect on DCs, which in turn have a weak positive effect on firm performance; DCs are manifested through absorptive and transformative capabilities as two common features across firms. We also find that the development and application of DCs is related to internal factors (such as success traps) rather than external factors (such as market dynamism).     

SERVICE SYSTEM DESIGN FOR THE PROPERTY AND CASUALTY INSURANCE INDUSTRY

This paper describes the changes that are forcing property and casualty insurance firms to rethink their service system design and in particular their distribution strategies. A set of questions related to distribution that are uppermost in the minds of executives in this industry are presented along with a literature survey of models that can be used to answer some of these questions. Based on the survey, a normative framework for designing the distribution system is proposed. Qualitative and quantitative analysis based on the proposed framework is presented along with empirical data to demonstrate the usefulness of the framework. The paper concludes with an agenda for further research.     

COMPETITION AND GENDER PREJUDICE: ARE DISCRIMINATORY EMPLOYERS DOOMED TO FAIL?

According to Becker's famous theory on discrimination (Gary Becker, 1957 , The Economics of Discrimination, University of Chicago Press), entrepreneurs with a strong prejudice against female workers forgo profits by submitting to their tastes. In a competitive market their firms lack efficiency and are therefore forced to leave. We present new empirical evidence for this prediction by studying the survival of start‐up firms in longitudinal matched employer–employee data. We find that firms with strong preferences for discrimination approximated by a low share of female employees relative to the industry average have significantly shorter survival rates. This is especially relevant for firms starting out with female shares in the lower tail of the distribution. Competition at the industry level additionally reduces firm survival and accelerates the rate at which prejudiced firms are weeded out. We also find evidence for employer learning as highly discriminatory start‐up firms that manage to survive submit to market powers and increase their female workforce over time.     

MATERIAL PLANNING FOR A REMANUFACTURING FACILITY

This article describes the first fully integrated material planning system to facilitate the management of a remanufacturing facility. A number of firms are already engaged in this activity. They remanufacture automobile, truck, and other vehicle components, like starters, alternators, transmissions, and so forth. These firms take in used components, disassemble them, and assemble saleable products from the good parts they find. There is considerable uncertainty in the supply of used components, the good parts in those components, and the demand for remanufactured products. Our system is based on material requirements planning logic, something that many firms in the industry are already familiar with. Meetings with experts in the industry were used to set the parameters of the system and evaluate its approach.     

Quality and flexibility performance trade-offs between lean and agile manufacturing firms in the automotive industry

Abstract

Firms operating in the automotive industry have traditionally been ascribed with efficiency and high levels of quality, as lean production has been extensively applied within this context, but given the recent dynamics in the automotive sector, there is also a need for high levels of flexibility, widening our attention to agile production. However, when lean and agile production have been explored simultaneously, the quality and flexibility trade-offs have been mixed and unclear. In order to dispel the lean-agile ambiguity, and given that both high levels of flexibility and quality are required within the automotive industry, the purpose of this study was to: (a) Identify the relationship between flexibility and quality; and (b) Explore the quality and flexibility differences between lean and agile production. Primary quantitative data was obtained via a survey and a total of 140 automotive manufacturing firms within the UK returned the survey. Logistic regressions were utilised as the main mode of analysis. Not only was an inverse relationship found between quality and flexibility, but our findings depict two distinctive Business Models (BMs) existing in the automotive industry, one lean and one agile. We advance the lean-agile debate by asserting that lean and agile firms acquire quality (efficiency) and flexibility strengths respectively, and not vice-versa. Given this, we theoretically side with the notion of performance ‘trade-offs’ and contend the idea that capabilities are cumulatively gained. By incorporating an argument built on the strategy literature on BMs and Dynamic Capabilities, we assert that lean and agile firms have evolved to underpin different kinds of competitive advantage within the same industry, but these advantages are placed at different tiers in the automotive supply chain.     

Additive Manufacturing and Production Internationalization: An Internalization Perspective

Additive manufacturing (AM) has been touted as a transformative technology that alters the way production is organized across geographical and organizational boundaries, yet little is known what this means for firms' internationalization of production. In this paper, we take an internalization theory perspective to hypothesize how the adoption of AM technology influences a firm's propensity to have an international production subsidiary, the number of foreign production subsidiaries that it operates, and the number of countries in which it has foreign production subsidiaries. To test our hypotheses, we rely on European Patent Office data to identify firms with AM-related patents and match this information to firm-level data of international production subsidiary networks from Bureau Van Dijk. Using both propensity score matching and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions, we find that AM firms are more likely to have a foreign production subsidiary than non-AM firms and operate them in more countries. We find partial evidence that AM firms have more foreign production subsidiaries than non-AM firms, in particular as compared to comparable innovative firms.     

Catch-up as a Survival Strategy in the Solar Power Industry

We evaluate the strategies of the emerging market firms in the context of nascent industries. We use the Indian solar power industry as the empirical setting, against the backdrop of the evolution of the global industry, While in traditional industries emerging market firms learn from advanced economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) and slowly upgrade their capabilities, in the intensely competitive environment of nascent innovative industries, emerging market firms are exposed to global competition in their home market right from the early years. This shortens their catch-up clock. As a result, their long-term survival depends on their ability to catch-up fast, both in output and innovation capabilities. In the solar power industry, we find that innovations stem, in the main, from advanced economy firms. Further, Chinese firms are beginning to move from cost-based imitation to innovation. In contrast, with a few key exceptions, most firms in the Indian solar industry remain locked within a narrow niche of downstream site-based installation. Their operations are opportunistic, short term, and without specific catch-up goals, a scenario that does not bode well for the industry's future in India.     

The cassava starch industry in Vietnam: can small firms survive and prosper?

The paper focuses on the starch industry in Vietnam. That industry is mainly composed of small firms that adapted to rapid change over the past decade. There are also large firms and multinationals in the industry. Based on 1998 field survey data, an analysis of microefficiency and transaction costs suggests that small and medium firms can survive and prosper in the industry. A policy strategy that promotes small and medium firms increases rural incomes, important in a country that is still mainly rural and where the income gap between urban and rural areas is growing.     

基于行业环境风险感知维度的中国企业国际扩张与绩效关系研究——兼论企业所有制形式的调节作用

企业的国际扩张与国际化绩效一直是国际商务研究关注的重要问题。然而,中国企业与西方企业在国际化扩张中最大差异之一则在于其所有制形式。本研究从中国企业所有制独特特性出发,实证检验了中国企业所有制形式对企业在国际扩张中行业环境风险感知、进入模式选择的影响,并进一步分析不同进入模式的绩效差异。研究发现,中国企业在国际化扩张进程中:(1)行业环境风险感知对国际进入模式选择具有显著负向影响;(2)所有制形式对企业的行业环境风险感知与国际进入模式产生重要的调节作用;(3)不同进入模式对企业的国际化绩效也会产生重要影响。     

The Impact of Organizational Culture on Time‐Based Manufacturing and Performance

Firms are utilizing an array of manufacturing practices in their quest for survival and success in the marketplace. The implementation of those practices has not always resulted in success stories as the focus had been mostly on technical issues, with little concern for “soft issues.” For example, the enabling role of organizational culture has often been ignored. Using Schein's conceptualization of culture as underlying assumptions, espoused values, and artifacts, we examine a framework that relates culture and manufacturing practices to performance. The underlying assumption of customer orientation is posited to affect espoused values such as beliefs on investing in facilities and equipment to leverage intellectual work and to promote creativity, beliefs on working with others, beliefs on making decisions that are global, beliefs on management control, and beliefs on integrating with suppliers. The espoused values are hypothesized to affect visible attributes of culture (behaviors) such as time‐based manufacturing practices, which firms are employing for competitive advantage. A sample of 224 firms is used for developing research instruments and testing the hypothesized relationships advanced. Results indicate that high levels of customer orientation lead to a set of managerial beliefs that are collaborative and integrative. In turn, certain espoused values support a high level of time‐based manufacturing practice, which leads to high performance.