R&D Management Special Issue
“The New Silk Road of Innovation: R&D networks, knowledge diffusions, and open innovation”
Guest Editor Team：
Jin CHEN, Tsinghua University
Alberto Di Minin, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa
Tim Minshall, University of Cambridge
Yu-shan SU, Taiwan Normal University
Lan XUE, Tsinghua University
Yuan ZHOU, Tsinghua University
Background for the Special Issue of R&D Management:
The Silk Road connected the East and West for almost 2000 years from the B.C. 300 to the 1700s, which provided the network of trade routes as well as the reciprocal knowledge interactions that roused and diffused the great innovations such as printing, textiles, and even the gun powder. However, as the decay of East Asian civilization in recent centuries, the Silk Road declines and fades out eventually, and the knowledge links between the East and West become intermittent and unidirectional – from the Western countries that play central roles in the global knowledge networks to the Oriental countries that are peripheral and mainly the recipients of technologies.
The context is now changing. Some recent research has identified the new trend of international technology transfer and corporations, such as reverse knowledge flows from the East to West, as well as the South-South technology transfers, which challenges the existing models in recent centuries (Hart and Christensen, 2002; Govindarajan and Ramamurti, 2011). Also, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted to welcome the “One Belt One Road” initiative (or so-called “New Silk Road”) that help to re-connect the East Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Middle East, as well as Europe in the aspects of economics, politics, as well as society. In particular, innovation collaborations and technology transfer among these regions is becoming one of the key aims of this initiative. In turn, various questions emerge.
- What is the role of “New Silk Road” to facilitate innovation collaborations and knowledge transfer?
- What are the business models and organizational designs to capture value through collaborations and transfer between the regions of the New Silk Road?
- How do companies adapt their R&D Management practices to compete and collaborate along the New Silk Road?
In this context, it becomes necessary to explore the nature, the paradigms, and the possible impacts of this “New Silk Road of Innovation”. We can identify at least three bodies of literature that can help understand emerging dynamics of collaboration, new business development and R&D management.
Firstly, the New Silk Road of innovation generates opportunities to develop newR&D networks(Rothwell and Dodgson, 1991; Macpherson, Jones, and Zhang, 2004). It involves a large number of countries with various research institutions that start to realize they can cooperate even with the variety of degrees of industrialisation; and in reality, the knowledge interactions (especially reciprocal ones) within these regions appear to increase in a very fast pace. On top of this, it poses new theoretical challenges to studies on these R&D network, as the forms of these R&D networks may be different from existing ones (Gassmann and Von Zedtwitz, 1999; Wright, Filatotchev, Hoskisson, and Peng, 2005), and they might require the creation of new safe nests for R&D appropriation (Di Minin and Bianchi, 2011). Given the rapid catch-up in innovation, those emerging economies along the “New Silk Road” may develop East-East R&D networks as well as East-West R&D reverse flows (McDougall, Shane, and Oviatt, 1994; Von Zedtwitz, 2004; Di Minin, Zhang, and Gammeltoft, 2012), and generate reverse innovation dynamics (Govindarajan and Trimble, 2012; Corsi, Di Minin, and Piccaluga, 2014).
Secondly, the New Silk Road of innovation may also have a far-reaching impact on howknowledge diffusesamong Asia, Europe and Africa (Häussler, 2010; Tang, 2016). International knowledge diffusion has been long viewed as cross-border knowledge spillovers from innovation-leaders to technology-following countries (Wang et al. 2015; Urban et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2016), so the latter ones may absorb overseas knowledge to develop their national innovation system (Freeman, 1986; Nelson, 1993; Huang et al. 2004). In most cases, these latecomers attempt to catch up through acquiring the production equipment, and based on which they learn manufacturing know-hows (or tacit knowledge) by doing, using, and interactions (Lundvall, 1992; Clausen et al., 2013; Parrilli et al., 2016). However, in recent years, the fast development of Eastern economies provides good “window opportunities” for traditional technology-followers to catch up or even stand a chance for leapfrogging (Tour et al., 2011; Li et al., 2015), so their demands on lead-edge science and technology help to form the basis for science-technology based innovation locally (Chen, Guo, and Zhu, 2012), which involves the new ways of cross-border knowledge diffusions within these regions – these need further investigations.
Finally, the New Silk Road of innovation represents a formidable opportunity to explore East-Westopen innovationpractices. Traditionally, iconic open innovation mainly happens in advanced countries, as Westerns firms work with Western universities to develop breakthrough innovations and novel products, and then spill over to Asian firms that would continue to improve the process for cost reduction and manufacturing efficiency so that they can produce in scale -- Asian universities barely play a role in this (Enkel, Gassmann, and Chesbrough, 2009; Li et al., 2016; Xu et al., 2017). However this is changing – the growth of national innovation system of Eastern economies provides new enabling factors for Eastern firms augment inbound and outbound knowledge flows with local universities for original innovations (Gawer and Cusumano, 2014; West, et al., 2014; Cassiman and Valentini, 2016). In addition, the embracement of digital-age technologies (e.g. big data, smart manufacturing, 3D printing, etc.) also brings significant changes on how Eastern firms and universities can innovate together – the alliances, innovation ecosystems, and the triple helix along the “New Silk Road” are being significantly re-framed in these impacts.
All in all, the New Silk Road of innovation poses new opportunities and challenges to studies onR&D networks,knowledge diffusionsandopen innovation. While this has major implications for practice, there are also important theoretical questions arising from this background. In this special issue, we aim to explore some of these questions, which can be explored by using a variety of theoretical perspectives and research designs.
Case for the special issue:
In this call for papers, our aim is to highlight the need to expand our understanding about what might be new paradigms for cultivating the innovation development along the New Silk Road that connects traditional innovation leaders and catch-uppers in Europe and Asia, and how these innovation activities along can be propelled. We can identify several themes associated with research questions, which include (but are surely not limited to):
1. The new nature (ways) of R&D diffusion along the New Silk Road of innovation:
a) What do R&D networks and knowledge diffusion in the New Silk Road look like? And how do they complement or substitute other R&D networks or knowledge flows?
b) What are new open innovation mechanisms that cultivate the R&D development of the new Silk Road?
c) What are new frameworks that may empower R&D networks along the New Silk Road?
2. New R&D opportunities to catch in the context of the New Silk Road of innovation:
a) How can the new Silk Road help to identify new opportunities for the development the R&D networks?
b) How can the new Silk Road help to identify new opportunities in knowledge diffusion?
c) What is the new role of open innovation, as leverage, the new Silk Road?
3. The role of the new Silk Road policies for enabling the R&D development:
a) What is the role of the new Silk Road in enabling the R&D networks and knowledge diffusion between innovation actors?
b) How does the nature of R&D development in the new Silk Road differ from other types of innovation development?
4. Methodological and empirical opportunities of studying the R&D development in the new Silk Road:
a) How to analyse the R&D networks and knowledge diffusion and their evolution in terms of their boundaries, leverage, scope, structure and dynamics?
b) What are novel ways of examining the co-evolution in the new Silk Road context (multi-method and big data-driven approaches)?
c) Which actionable research designs could enable both theory building and practical development?
The special issue strongly encourages the submission of paper focused and robust from the empirical perspective. The contributions in the special issue have to enrich the literature and the debate on R&D Management issues identifying strong managerial and policy implications.
Paper Submission
l September 15, 2019: Submission deadline for papers submitted to R&D Management. (please clearly indicate the special issue “Framing the new Silk Road of innovation”)
l October or November 2019: (optional to be confirmed) Special Issue Workshop in Tsinghua University
l (Expected) September 15, 2020: Submission of selected and reviewed papers to the Editorial-in-Chief for publication.
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