As emerging countries are increasingly gaining prominence in the global economic arena, significantly more emphasis has been placed on understanding how latecomer firms in these countries can technologically learn, innovate and successfully catch-up with their counterparts in advanced economies.
However, current innovation theories and practices, mainly optimised for advanced economies and newly industrialised economies such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, often fail to provide firms and governments with satisfactory guidance in the context of these new emerging countries. For instance, the existing but more relevant wisdom of latecomers’ technological learning and catch-up, generally drawn from Japan and South Korea, has been long discussed by academic and practice communities for its inapplicability in these new emerging countries. Because the international economic and technical conditions as well as domestic factor endowments are largely different from those of Japan, South Korea and other newly industrialised economies, there is a need for new innovation theories for these emerging countries.
Collaborative innovation represents one emerging innovation paradigm specifically designed to theorise innovation within such emerging countries. Although it is still a somewhat new concept, it has quickly been gaining momentum since the 2000s.
The collaborative innovation paradigm can be described as a new model in which firms collaborate with different innovation parties such as universities, research institutes, governments and other firms to generate superior innovation. The new innovation paradigm assumes that firms, universities, governments, research institutes and other firms should team up to reap the new opportunities they have unleashed in terms of the rapid growth of domestic markets, a burgeoning pool of skilled labor, accumulated capital and low factor costs, as well as what globalisation brings, e.g. global technology markets and de-integrated production, global innovation collaboration networks, and rapid foreign direct investments.
The collaborative effects of innovation can take place in the forms of sharing technology and other research resources, reduction of repeat research investment, rapid technology development and diffusion, combinations of low factor costs with advanced technology, domestic technology with foreign technology, and on various intersections, such as between market and technology, existing technology applications and emerging technology research, and internal innovation and external collaboration.
To better understand this new innovation paradigm in emerging countries, this special issue aims to collect a set of high-quality papers investigating these phenomena and their related dimensions as exemplified below.
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:
- Drivers of external collaboration with universities, research institutes and other firms in emerging countries
- Success factors for external collaborations in emerging countries
- Antecedents, collaboration types, and contributions to firms' innovation performance
- Technology searching across different boundaries
- Configuring external technology, market opportunities with internal learning activities
- The role of government and IPR regimes in external R&D collaborations
- Changing collaboration partner portfolios along firms' market and technology upgrading
- Implementation of global innovation collaborations
- Exploitation of both foreign and domestic technology resources and application to either domestic or global markets
- Initiating and organising disruptive and reverse innovations
- The role of returnees in key technology generation and radical innovations
- A comprehensive comparison of industry-science link between advanced and emerging countries
Submission deadline for abstract (optional): 31 January, 2012
Submission deadline for full papers: 31 May, 2012
Notification of acceptance: 31 August, 2012
Submission deadline for final version: 31 October, 2012
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