Innovation has widely been regarded as one of the main drivers of economic growth in the knowledge economy. This paper investigates the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of regional innovation capabilities using a panel data set from China. It finds that FDI has a significant positive impact on the overall regional innovation capacity. FDI intensity is also positively associated with innovation efficiency in the host region. The strength of this positive effect depends, however, on the availability of the absorptive capacity and the presence of innovation-complementary assets in the host region. The increased regional innovation and technological capabilities have contributed further to regional economic growth in China's coastal regions but not in the inland regions. It concludes that the type and quality of FDI inflows and the strength of local absorptive capacity and complementary assets in the host regions are crucial for FDI to serve as a driver of knowledge-based development. Policy implications are discussed.
Abstract. In this study, we review the literature on the creation and diffusion of innovation in the private sectors (industry and services) in developing countries. In particular, we collect evidence on what are the barriers to innovation creation and diffusion and the channels of innovation diffusion to and within developing countries. We find that innovation in developing countries is about creation or adoption of new ideas and technologies; but the capacity for innovation is embedded in and constituted by dynamics between geographical, socio-economic, political and legal subsystems. We contextualize the findings from the review in the current theoretical framework of diffusion of innovations, and we emphasize how the institutional context typical of developing countries impacts the diffusion itself.
International research collaboration (IRC) has been increasingly important as an emerging area of innovation studies. This study reviews the intellectual base, main research trajectories and intellectual communities of the IRC research domain over the period 1957-2015. It integrates qualitative review and three quantitative analyses including co-citation network analysis, main path analysis and bibliographic coupling analysis. The results show that the IRC research has gone through three phases, namely, "emergence" (1957-1991), "fermentation" (1992-2005) and "take-off" (2006-2015) phases. The co-citation network analysis confirms that the IRC research field has been developed under the influence of two pioneering studies related to bibliometrics research. The main research trajectories in IRC studies over its three development phases and over the whole period are identified based on the main path analysis, which shows that co-authorship analysis is the main research method in IRC studies. A bibliographic coupling analysis suggests that the whole IRC research domain can be classified into five distinct intellectual areas: drivers of IRC, IRC patterns, IRC effects, IRC networks and IRC measurement. Seven topics for future research are also identified.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.