Innovation, technology and cities inside China

Citation

Wu, W.-W. (2012), "Innovation, technology and cities inside China", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 6 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/cms.2012.32306aaa.001

Innovation, technology and cities inside China

Article Type: Guest Editor foreword From: Chinese Management Studies, Volume 6, Issue 1

Welcome to this special issue of Chinese Management Studies, focusing on innovation, technology and cities inside China. Twelve papers, selected for this special issue, provide a comprehensive overview of the innovation activities in China’s enterprises, governments and cities. From the micro level to the macro level, these papers look at topics as diverse as four categories:

1. 1.

   the factors affecting innovation or enterprise performance;

2. 2.

   enterprise innovation model;

3. 3.

   industry innovation; and

4. 4.

   urban development.

The first category explores the relationships among factors related to innovation and technology. Four papers are devoted to this category, all of them applying surveyed data.

The paper, “Nascent entrepreneurs in China: social class identity, prior experience affiliation and identification of innovative opportunity” by Tian Li and Veronica Gustafsson, provides insight on the relationships among social class identity, prior experience affiliation and the identification of innovative opportunity in China’s nascent entrepreneurs. By analyzing data from the “China Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamic, CPSED” project, Tian and Gustafsson find that the social class identity and prior experience affiliation of nascent entrepreneurs have significant impacts on the innovativeness of their entrepreneurial identification, and they play a much more important role than the mode of the opportunity identification as they determine opportunity identification results. These findings lead to useful suggestions for China’s nascent entrepreneurs, governments and entrepreneurship supporting agencies.

In the paper, “How does organizational structure influence performance through learning and innovation in Austria and China”, Qingmin Hao et al. investigate the relationships among organizational structure, organizational learning, innovation, and organizational performance. They collect and analyze questionnaire data from 90 enterprises in Austria and 71 enterprises in China. Their study indicates that organizational structure exerts not only direct effects on organizational performance, but also indirect effects through organizational learning and innovation. The study, at the same time, is also informative by identifying and discussing the differences in how organizational structure affects organizational performance between Austrian enterprises and Chinese enterprises, between knowledge intensive industry and labor or capital intensive industry, between young firms and old firms, and between the thinking of senior managers and that of middle and junior managers.

The paper by Guanna Xu et al., “Effects of relational embeddedness on technological innovation: an empirical study in China”, looks at how relational embeddedness impacts firm’s technological innovation. The cases of five Chinese firms are studied to posit the hypotheses of relationships among trust, information sharing, joint problem solving, new knowledge acquisition, new knowledge application, and technological innovation performance. 228 Chinese manufacturing firms are investigated to collect data to test these hypotheses. The results show that relational embeddedness exerts a positive effect on technological innovation performance through explorative learning. However, the positive relationships between information and new knowledge application and between joint problem solving and new knowledge acquisition are not proved. These results make this paper a favorable supplement to the inter-firm network theories in developing countries.

Tang Zhen et al., in “Trusting relationships of CTO-CEO and CTO’s participation in technology strategy: based on empirical study of Chinese high-tech firms”, explore the impact of trusting CTO-CEO relationships on the CTO’s participation in technology strategy. Based on a questionnaire survey of high-tech firms in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Beijing, they find that trusting CTO-CEO relationships have a significant positive impact on CTO’s participation in technology strategy, which is moderated by CTO’s power distribution. The detailed relationships are illustrated among dimensions of trusting CTO-CEO relationships, CTO’s power distribution and CTO’s participation in technology strategy. The paper also shows its practical importance by providing measures for improving CTO’s participation in technology strategy and indicating basic qualifications an excellent CTO should have.

The second category, consisting of four papers, introduces the theories and practices of China’s enterprise innovation and provides innovation models.

Gang Xiang and Ying Wu review the development of Enterprise’s Sustainable Innovation (ESI) in China from two perspectives: practical and theoretical. In “Enterprise’s sustainable innovation in China: practice and theoretical research”, they discover, first, that ESI practice in China was started up and spurred by the national institutional innovation, and it experienced two development stages: the first stage from 1978 to 2005, and the second stage from 2006 to now. Second, they discover that ESI practice has changed in innovation types, enterprises’ ownership types, industry types, and goals. Third, they find that the conception, the theoretical foundation, the evaluation methods, the capability, the impetus, the opportunities, and the mechanism of ESI are Chinese scholars’ research interests. The paper is valuable in providing a clear overview of the current research on ESI in China, and more important, the agenda for future research.

Zhang Bo and Tao Qiuyan in their paper construct a model for the selection of technological innovation strategies for small and middle enterprises (SMEs), based on the analysis of the current technological innovation in China’s SMEs, and its complexity and main influencing factors. “Research of SME’s technology innovation model from multiple perspectives” shows its specialty in constructing the model from the comprehensive perspectives of the wealth and scale, the status in the industry, the technological innovation capability, the growth stage in its life cycle, and technological innovation environments. Four strategies are proposed according to the model, which are named by Zhang Bo and Tao Qiuyuan as imitation innovation strategy, cooperation innovation strategy, ability transplanting innovation strategy and leadership innovation strategy.

Wei-Wei Wu et al. proffer a theoretical and practical construction for the successful independent innovation in China’s equipment manufacturing enterprises in “How China’s equipment manufacturing firms achieve successful independent innovation: Double helix mode of technological capability and technology management”. By employing a grounded theory approach to explore an in-depth case study of Harbin Electric Corporation, Wu et al. find that technological capability (TC) and technology management (TM) both exert important influence on successful independent innovation; TC and TM have interactive effects on each other; and they are coupled in the form of a double helix. Thus, Wu et al. propose a new model for independent innovation, the double helix model of TC and TM. The paper is original in its effort to explore the innovation mode from the perspectives of TC, TM and their interaction.

The paper, “Research on the evaluation model of Chinese enterprises technological innovation system” by Xi Chen and Shuming Zhao, constructs a framework and an inner model to comprehend the technological innovation system, and presents a new model for evaluating enterprises’ technological innovation capability. The results illustrate that the adaptability of an innovation system to its environment relies on the conditions and capabilities of subjects in the system, as well as the structure of the system; and the fuzzy catastrophe theory can be applied to assess the enterprise TC. The contribution of this paper lies in the insight into technological innovation capability from the perspective of the Complex Adaptive System theory.

In the third category, two papers look at innovation and technology at the industry level. Case studies are applied in papers in this category.

“NEV technology in China” by Yingqi Liu and Ari Kokko provide an understanding of actors of the innovation system of the new energy vehicles (NEV) industry in China, and its functions from the perspectives of legitimation, resource mobilization, influence on the direction of search, market formation, entrepreneurial experimentation, knowledge development and diffusion, and development of positive externalities. Liu and Kokko find that actors in the systems include governments, vehicle manufacturing enterprises, R&D institutes, and others. By examining the cases of two companies, BYD and Changan, they also find that governments play a dominant role in China’s NEV industry by providing R&D funds, defining technical standards, influencing market demand, and guiding other actors in the industry. Results in this paper can be regarded as a good answer to the question: “Who does what in the Chinese new energy vehicle industry”.

The paper, “Government driven model of institutional change through adoption of new technology: a case study of the failed pharmaceutical bidding and procurement platforms in China” by Mingzhi Li and Kai Reimers, reflects on the history of China’s pharmaceutical distribution industry and a case of Beijing’s implementation of the Centralized Medicine Procurement. Results indicate that technological solutions will not survive the constraints imposed by the institutional environment and by individual behavioral traits, so it is important to align the mode of governing transactions with the institutional environment and individual behavioral traits for success. Moreover, in a broader sense, the case study in this paper is a detailed showcase to illustrate limitations and problems of the “Chinese model” of implementing institutional change related to new technologies, which increase more value to the paper.

Finally, this special issue ends with two papers discussing urban development in China, which constitute the fourth category.

An empirical study by Zheng Fu titled, “Research on transition of China’s resource cities: A case study of Pingxiang”, reports the economic and social development, the energy consumption, the industrial structure and benefits, and the development of the green economy of Pingxiang, a resource-exhausted in China, by comparing with other Chinese cities. Fu finds that although Pingxiang has obtained a great progress in the economic transformation, its current economic development is still highly dependent on investments and the consumption of its natural resources; its energy consumption is still high; its industrial structure is still unreasonable; and it has lagged behind in the development of the green economy. Political suggestions for Pingxiang’s development are then proposed. Fu’s findings and suggestions are not only valuable for Pingxiang, but also referential to other resource-exhausted cities in China.

Yao Yongling and Shi Lushan focus on another kind of cities in China – the world city. In the paper “World city growth model and empirical application of Beijing”, they explore the research question, how do world cities develop, by constructing a growth model to analyze the data of Beijing. Looking the “world city growth capacity” as an integration of the “economic controlling power”, the “creativity”, “economic vitality”, the “basic infrastructure” and the “social equity”, Yao and Shi find that the investment of private sectors has a positive effect on Beijing’s “world city growth capacity”, while the government’s investment has a negative effect; and technological progress has little influences on Beijing’s “world city growth capacity”. The paper shows its value in constructing the World City Growth Model from the perspectives of private investment and public investment, and in explaining the growth dynamics of Beijing as a world city.

Taken as a whole, the papers in this special issue are all valuable in providing new ideas and new discoveries in the research areas of Chinese innovation, technology and cities inside China. I hope you find these papers interesting and I also hope this special issue will stimulate future explorative studies in these fields.

I would like as Guest Editor of this remarkable issue to express my gratitude and appreciation to Professor Check Teck Foo, the Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Management Studies, for organizing the series of special issues. I’m also thankful to the authors, reviewers and editors for their contributions.

Wei-Wei WuSPURS Fellow, MIT