Editorial

APJIE, an open forum for multidisciplinary convergence research

In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the world economy is entering a new era.

The leadership of each country to open the era is urged to strengthen the cooperation between advanced and developing countries so that countries could economically grow together and prosper. The competition among countries and among global corporations is increasingly intensified because of technological advancement and innovations. The primary concerns of the global economy, and also global corporations, perhaps are to keep technological innovations and their contributions to the global economy for the continual emergence of new startups. Key challenges in two aspects have become vitally important; R&D competency to develop innovative technologies with creative capabilities and the leadership to deliver competitiveness in the market.

We, the editors, are very proud to say that the Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (APJIE) has been growing steadily for the past 11 years. From now on, however, it is necessary to attempt to be self-disruptive, different from the incremental development of the past. The motivations of innovation are to study the dynamic interactions between the market and consumers, that is, the industry and users, and to provide optimal answers that companies can actively overcome.

The experiencing and studying endless innovation challenges, leading new paradigms of business start-ups and ongoing development, will have to be broadened and deepened further in this era than before. In attempts to satisfy the demands, it should step up the efforts to research dynamic management, new innovations and start-ups in the changing global economy. For this, it is necessary to expand the theoretical and practical convergence in both quantitative and qualitative measure. APJIE must open a forum for convergence research.

Recently, research on technology innovation, and consumer and market innovation is more active than ever. In particular, the multidisciplinary convergence research has expanded rapidly. This includes the convergence approach of engineering, humanities, social science, technologies and education to train gifted individuals in whole brain thinking. Looking back over the past 11 years of APJIE, the journal must stride further as a forum for convergence research in the new era.

In the Asia-Pacific region, it needs to further develop collaborative research between industry and academia to further reinforce the integration of practical examples on the theoretical foundations. It is necessary to increase case studies and broaden the breadth and the quality of research areas. For this, the empirical research on the institutional improvement in public entrepreneurship should be extended to the cases of university entrepreneurship research, enterprise entrepreneurship and start-up cases.

It is necessary to establish a full-fledged interdisciplinary field of “Research on Convergence Innovation,” in addition to the case study of active convergence research and theoretical framework of engineering, business administration, natural science and humanities and social studies. This is a new direction, a challenge and a task for APJIE in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution with the keywords of new innovation and start-ups.

We hope that the journal could become a platform for convergence research, and to be an open forum including empirical, theoretical and also practical studies facilitating collaboration between company and university, industry and industry, institution and company and even country and country and so on.

As a suggestion for the direction of future research, it is necessary to form an ecological system for the fusion of new technology innovation and entrepreneurship. We, editors, suggest the future direction of the journal as follows:

• first, it should develop the capacity to invite researchers from various fields and disciplines;

• second, case studies of diverse collaborative research and studies should be included;

• third, an interdisciplinary research must be encouraged and therefore activated; and

• fourth, the quantity and quality of innovation and entrepreneurship studies must be improved.

At the same time, we also suggest the direction of new innovation research as follows:

• first, it should invest in the introduction of new research;

• second, it should apply research methodologies used in other disciplines to achieve self-destructive innovation and improve capacity to absorb;

• third, it should try to benchmark and catch-up on leading research; and

• fourth, it needs to create a shared platform for researchers to enable dynamic research in real time.

We hope that APJIE will create an attractive opportunity for new technology innovation and entrepreneurial research by realizing once again the urgency of new research methodology in a new era.

To achieve the partial fulfillment of the new objectives of the APJIE, this volume has been humbly dedicated to publish the papers concerning the impacts of innovation type and R&D capability, locus of legitimacy and startup resources and new acquisition strategies. Some other papers present evidences from social enterprises, the factors influencing decent working conditions and the role of universities for the change of a network structures. This volume also includes macro-level enabling conditions for social entrepreneurial foundation, new strategic planning and performance of SMEs and the moderating effect of market dynamism. Finally, the Japanese government’s venture capital, and the structure, status and conditions of small and medium enterprises are presented and discussed. The next volume of the APJIE will be focusing on the topics of Social Innovation that includes several topics such as but not limited to the ones mentioned below.

Subject coverage

Examples of topics appropriate to the theme of social innovation may include:

• case studies of social innovation;

• social innovation leadership;

• global new business creation;

• pedagogy to promote social innovation mindsets;

• social innovation resources such as finance, human resources, marketing, information and operations;

• role of non-profit and government in social innovation;

• successes and failures of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in social innovation perspective; and

• other related topics.

Notes for prospective authors

Submitted papers should be an original work so that they should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important dates

• Paper Submission Deadline: April 15, 2018.

• Paper Publication Date: August, 2018 (Vol. 12, No. 2).

We are very happy to invite professor Yang Sok Kim, School of Management Information Systems, Keimyung University as a new addition to the Editorial Board, who is also responsible for the management of the APJIE website, www.apjie.org, or www.apjie.net. The APJIE Desk is grateful to Mr Ye Jun Park of KonKuk University who has been serving as the website manager since 2016 for the last two years.