This study examines how Chinese firms capture value from their innovations. We propose that relationship-building through business entertainment may be helpful. In particular, wining and dining key stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, distributors, and government officials, can help firms gain access to complementary resources necessary for commercializing their innovations, facilitating capturing value from innovations. However, business entertainment is less effective in regions with relatively developed market-supporting institutions, including factor markets and legal institutions. The analysis results of archival data and data from a World Bank survey of Chinese firms support all the above arguments.

Motivated by the research gap on intergenerational succession dynamics of family firms, this study examines the effects of initiating intergenerational succession on firms' innovation activities. We propose that initiation of intra-family succession can result in founder–successor co-governance that represents a strategic transition to the succession and incorporates the two conflicting yet complementary directions of change and continuity. Grounded in the theory of altruism, we suggest that co-governance will positively affect firms' innovation activities and that this positive link is contingent on the idiosyncratic intra-family relationships of kinship type, age difference, and gender difference between the founder and the successor. Furthermore, we posit that co-governance will lead to a flow of resources to low risk, rather than more inventive but higher risk, innovations. Based on the unbalanced panel data of 4,694 firm-year observations in our sample from listed Chinese family firms during the 2006–2015 period, empirical analysis supports our hypotheses and confirms that when examining family firms' innovation, there is a need to take the heterogeneity of the intra-family governance structure more fully into consideration.

This study investigates the influence of managerial cognition and attention allocation on firms’ responses to negative performance feedback. We explore how managerial cognition, as shaped by managers’ experiences, connections, positions, and industry environments, affects underperforming firms’ attention allocation and, consequently, their decisions to invest in innovation. Utilizing a longitudinal sample of Chinese high-tech firms from 2009 to 2017, we find that firms increase investment in research and development (R&D) when performance falls below aspiration levels. We also document that underperforming firms are associated with an even larger R&D investment increase when their CEOs have an R&D or engineering background, serve simultaneously as the board chair, or are not politically connected. In addition, we highlight the moderating effects of industry competition and industry norms on the relationship between firm underperformance and R&D intensity. We conclude that managerial cognition affects firms’ allocation of attention to innovation as a solution for closing performance gaps and shapes corporate responses to negative performance feedback.

The Indian pharmaceutical industry has experienced rapid growth, becoming the world's largest provider of generic drugs, based on product and process innovation. The industry has undergone dynamic changes in recent decades, operating in a rapidly evolving environment affected by domestic and global policies; a key example of the latter is the TRIPS agreement. Taking an intellectual property perspective, we describe how changes in the innovation ecosystem have affected companies’ strategies related to international activity and accessing knowledge from both internal and external knowledge sources, during the transitional- and post-TRIPS periods (1995–2004 and 2005–2014, respectively). Combining intellectual property arguments with contextual aspects of the innovation ecosystem, we conjecture that, in the post-TRIPS period, externally-sourced knowledge will be more important than internally-sourced knowledge, for Indian pharmaceutical firms’ international business activity.

The need to innovate is relevant to many firms around the globe and is particularly pressing for those in emerging markets. They face global competition, are under-resourced, and suffer from weaker institutional support. It is suggested that to innovate successfully in this context, indigenous firms would benefit from focusing on managing their current knowledge base more efficiently. We know little about how knowledge management works outside developed economies and which knowledge governance mechanisms have more influence than others in the context of emerging economies. To address this gap, we explore how context may matter for the use of knowledge governance mechanisms and their effect on innovation performance in Brazilian firms. Using the survey data of 109 firms, structural equation modelling, and cluster analysis, our findings suggest that the joint application of knowledge-focused rewards, organizational design, and information and communication technologies that support knowledge processes is critical for boosting innovation performance. We discuss how the peculiarities of the Brazilian context may shape these findings. Our article contributes to the knowledge management and innovation literature by demonstrating that the joint effects of bundles of knowledge governance mechanisms and contextual variables should be explored in order to understand their impact on organizational outcomes.

This study examines how competitive and cooperative relationships within R&D consortia influence member firms’ innovation output. We propose a U-shaped relationship between the presence of market competitors for a member firm and the firm's joint R&D output with other consortium members, and examine how the relationship is mediated by interactions with other members at the firm level and moderated by collaborative efforts at the consortium level. Using a unique sample of 320 firms from 52 R&D consortia in China, we find support for our predictions. This multi-level study extends our understanding of competition and cooperation in multi-party networks and provides insights for creating a balance between the two forces that is conducive to innovation.

Since the United States committed to withdraw from the UN Paris Agreement on climate change, international observers have increasingly asked if China can take the lead instead to raise global ambition in the context of a world leadership vacuum. Given the country's increasing economic and strategic focus on sustainable and low-carbon innovation, China might seem well placed to do so. However, much depends on the direction of governance and reform within China regarding the environment. To better understand how the government is seeking to make progress in these areas, this article explores key political narratives that have underpinned China's policies around sustainable development (kechixu fazhan) and innovation (chuangxin) within the context of broader narratives of reform. Drawing on theoretical insights from work that investigates the role of power in shaping narratives, knowledge and action around specific pathways to sustainability, this article explores the ways in which dominant policy narratives in China might drive particular forms of innovation for sustainability and potentially occlude or constrain others. In particular, we look at ecological civilization (shengtai wenming) as a slogan that has gradually evolved to become an official narrative and is likely to influence pathways to sustainability over the coming years.

The resource-based view of the firm has previously been expanded by including relational rents and rent from network and alliance participation. This paper extends the Dyer-Singh-Lavie synthesis by considering the special circumstances arising from the relationships, alliances, and networks of a mega-event, using the Beijing Olympics as a case for our analyses. The mega-event that is organized as a cartel increases the pricing power of the participants, produces relational rent, and is an ideal venue to introduce innovations. We discuss six factors that can influence the rent creation and capture from a mega-event and offer related propositions: periodicity (Proposition 1), event location (Proposition 2), governance structure (Proposition 3), media coverage (Proposition 4), network connectivity (Proposition 5), and membership rules (Proposition 6). We identify four innovation types associated with such mega-events and contend that the same factors can affect the entrepreneurial rent creation and capture within these innovation types (Proposition 7).

Time pacing, which refers to the regulation of intensity and direction of people's attention and effort, is central to innovation management. However, in a study of complex product innovation in pharmaceuticals, we find that time pacing is a major source of conflict between managers and scientists over innovation management. Our analysis of this tension reveals that two very different forms of time pacing operate in this complex innovation. Clock-time pacing, which gauges progress by the predictable passage of clock time, is used by strategic managers to reduce unnecessary exploration, focus on necessary questions, and speed up the execution of steps. Event-time pacing, which gauges progress by the unpredictable achievement of learning events, is used by the scientists to develop a deep understanding of how a drug might behave in the body against a disease, to focus on learning by asking many questions, and to integrate emergent results into plausible patterns. We identify four dimensions that differentiate clock-time pacing from event-time pacing, which drive the tension between the two. We summarize negative effects that this tension can have on innovation if left unaddressed, and then suggest ways to integrate clock-time pacing with event-time pacing. We also discuss implications for Chinese management.

This paper elaborates theories of organizational knowledge creation by exploring the implications of institutional change for organizational knowledge creation in Chinese organizations of different ownership forms. Using a dynamic institutional perspective, we discuss prominent characteristics of the Chinese context and develop propositions about knowledge creation patterns in different organizational forms. We also theorize about the effects of increasing institutionalization on patterns of organizational knowledge creation in China and the consequent implications for innovation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of this model and suggestions for further research.

This article provides background information on public and non-profit sector innovation in the past thirty years in the West as well as in China. We summarized and commented on the articles in this issue, which document cases of public and non-profit sector innovation in China and theorize their significance. These cases tell vivid stones about how Chinese organizations innovate and also point out the importance of the role of government in initiating or constraining these innovations. We find, through the review of these studies, that China's public and non-profit sector organization innovation experiences carry some important messages about the unique features of China's public and non-profit organizations that should not be ignored while studying changes in China.

In commenting on the articles in this Editors' Forum, three questions are addressed: (i) how should we operationalize and measure creative outputs to enable a sound analysis of cross-cultural differences in creativity; (ii) could it be that culture impacts not only the valuation of originality and usefulness but also the psychological processes through which original yet useful ideas and insights are achieved; and (iii) does culture impact the domains in which individuals are more or less motivated to perform creatively? Using recent work on creativity as a starting point, and the key findings reported in this Editors' Forum, I propose that new research on culture and creativity would benefit from separating creative products from creative processes, and would do justice to the nature and functionality of cultures by asking not only when and how individuals and groups achieve creativity, but also why they would bother to be creative in the first place.

This Editors' Forum – ‘Creativity East and West’ – presents five papers on the question of cultural differences in creativity from the perspective of different research literatures, followed by two integrative commentaries. The literatures represented include historiometric, laboratory, and organizational studies. Investigation of cultural influences through country comparisons and priming manipulations, focusing on how people perform creatively and how they assess creativity. This introduction notes parallels in the findings across these research perspectives, suggesting some cultural universals in creativity and some systematic differences. Many differences can be explained in terms of the model that creativity means a solution that is both novel/original and useful/appropriate, yet that Western social norms prioritize novelty whereas Eastern norms prioritize usefulness – an account which predicts cultural differences would arise in contexts that activate social norms. The commentaries elaborate this argument in terms of processes – at the micro cognitive level and at the macro societal level – through which creativity occurs.

As the largest and fastest growing transition economy in the world, China's entrance onto the global stage has been swift and dramatic. As such, almost every facet of entrepreneurship, from the identification of nascent opportunities to the challenges of managing triple-digit growth to the transformation of firms from dying to emerging industries, can be studied as natural experiments. The four papers in this issue are dedicated to exploring entrepreneurial innovation in the Chinese private economy. They include two clinical studies, one on the impact of the Beijing Olympics on entrepreneurship, and the other on the co-evolution of guanxi networks and entrepreneurial growth. Two studies test theories explaining the organizational drivers of innovation and entrepreneurship. In the best traditions, these four studies offer theoretical insights on the broader implications of entrepreneurship research in the Chinese context. We locate the findings offered by these four papers in the systems, organizational and social contexts of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship research. Finally, we offer some suggestions for future research and ways in which advances in the theoretical conversation should proceed.

Prior research has suggested a number of potential benefits to firm membership in business groups. These benefits include availability of capital and other resources not readily accessible in an open market, the facilitation of entrepreneurship, plus information and risk sharing advantages. We suggest that another important benefit is the assistance of group control systems in helping the firm to manage conflicting pressures in the institutional environment and facilitate coevolution of these conflicting pressures. To empirically demonstrate the relevance of this viewpoint, we examine the case of China where business groups facilitate institutional transition, actively balancing market pressures to increase levels of innovativeness in firms with institutional pressures emanating from the government to maintain high employment levels. Using data from a broad sample of more than 1,000 Chinese affiliate firms in more than 200 business groups, we find that government policy, ownership and managerial mindset influence the political goal of maintaining high employment levels, while interdependence among group affiliate firms is related to lower employment levels. However, while government ownership and the government managerial mindset were negatively related to market innovation activities, group financial and cultural control systems positively affected the tendency of affiliate firms to focus on market innovation.