1,721,051 research outputs found
Innovation in Belgium: policies and statistics
No full textThe paper gives a snapshot on STI policies and indicators for Belgium. It highlights the institutions and competences in science, technology and innovation policy in Belgium and the distribution of responsibilities in the Belgian STI policy system. It pasy attention to general orientations for STI policies of the different authorities in Belgium and a snapshot on STI statistics focused on Belgium including enablers, facilitators, and results. It ends with some critical remarks and perspectives for STI policy making in Belgium.status: Publishe
Transnational corporations and economic development: from internationalization to globalization
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Essays on the location of FDI of multinational firms.
No full textIn the last decades, there have been many studies that focused on location decisions of multinational companies (MNCs) and on the geographical distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI). Traditional factors that have been found to influence the location decision are among others the market demand, market growth, purchasing power and sophistication of demand, degree of openness, language similarity, geographical distance, population density, infrastructure, tax rate, and wages (e.g. Alcácer & Chung, 2007; Bas & Sierra, 2002; Basile, Castellani, & Zanfei, 2008; Bel & Fageda, 2008; Belderbos, Leten, & Suzuki, 2009; Friedman, Gerlowski, & Silberman, 1992; Kumar, 2001).
The current body of literature however still suffers from important limitations and research gaps that need to be addressed. Three issues have not received due attention. Firstly, the literature documents how MNCs’ FDI decisions respond to location traits, but does not take into account that strategies and decisions made by incumbents also shape these locational traits and can significantly alter the attractiveness of the region for other investors. Secondly, existing studies devoted only limited attention to firm and investment heterogeneity in location decisions. Finally, most location studies focus on countries and do not acknowledge the large heterogeneity among regions within countries.
The shaping of locational traits by incumbents
Locational traits can be affected by incumbents in various ways. In this thesis, we focus on three potential mechanisms. Firstly, leading incumbent firms can take strategic decisions to discourage inward investors. Secondly, strong incumbent firms can source and integrate knowledge from different international regions and thereby increase the global knowledge connectivity of the region. Thirdly, incumbents can convey important locational information to other potential investors and can serve as role models that can be followed by other firms.
Strategic decisions to discourage other investors can refer to knowledge protection strategies adopted by technology leading firms. These firms are often large multi-location firms that can make use of strong internal linkages across or within locations to limit the risk of outgoing knowledge spillovers and to leverage knowledge for competitive advantages. Such practices will significantly reduce other firms’ potential to benefit from incoming spillovers. Since investing firms take the potential for incoming knowledge spillovers into account when they decide on the location of new R&D facilities (e.g. Aharonson et al., 2007; Chung and Alcácer, 2002), they may refrain from locating their R&D activities in regions where incumbent firms are making use of such mechanisms to prevent outgoing knowledge flows.
The knowledge connectivity of a region increases when incumbent multinationals (MNCs) make use of their dispersed network of affiliates and partners and integrate resources and knowledge from multiple locations across space (Cano-Kollmann et al., 2016). As MNCs are well established as the superior form of organization to move tacit and codified knowledge across border (Cantwell and Santangelo, 1999) they can orchestrate increasingly complex knowledge networks with knowledge linkages spanning geographic, organizational and technological space. Locations that feature as important geographic nodes in these network can evolve into important innovation hubs which are highly connected to foreign regions, and with benefits for both the location and the firms located in that location. The current location literature however does not take this connectedness into account, neither does it focus on the co-evolution of mobile firms and immobile locations (e.g. Cano-Kollmann et al., 2016).
Finally, incumbents can have important signal function to other investors. Incumbents can convey important information about the region’s environmental factors and comparative advantages to other investors. This can increase the perceived attractiveness of the region and can lead to mimetic behavior of other investors. Especially when incumbents invested only very recently in the host location, mimicry effects can be strong. These effects however strongly depend on the status and reputation of the incumbent firms.
Firm and investment type heterogeneity in location decisions
The current body of literature devoted only limited attention to the heterogeneity among investing firms in the valuation of location-specific characteristics and to the heterogeneity among investment types. In this thesis, we examine various forms of heterogeneity. We examine emerging market investors (Chinese MNEs), rather than developed country multinationals and within this group we analyse differences between privately owned and state-owned enterprises (POEs and SOEs). Additionally, we examine heterogeneity due to differences in knowledge assets, and differences in investment preferences related to the position of the investment project in the value chain.
Studies show that FDI has expanded at a rapid pace in the last decade and that an increasing part of this growth has been spurred by multinationals from developing countries. These multinationals were responsible for around 32 percent of total outgoing FDI in 2014, which is an enormous difference with a decade ago (UNCTAD, 2015). A prime example is China. China has been primarily known as a destination for FDI for years, but currently it is China’s outbound FDI that is shaping the world and the country is ranked in the top 3 in terms of FDI outflows. Yet, despite that developing country multinationals often have different motives to engage in FDI and exhibit different location patterns than the more traditional multinationals from developed countries, most location studies still focus on the latter group.
Differences in the valuation of location-specific characteristics between firms with a different ownership structure such as privately and state-owned companies remain largely overlooked as well. These firms however have different incentives, objectives and resources, which makes them subject to different location drivers.
Existing studies have shown that firms with differences in knowledge bases (studies mainly focus on leaders versus laggards) can show different location patterns, but how the geographic characteristics of this knowledge base can influence the final location decision has not been investigated yet.
Finally, the literature has documented that increasing globalization and competition result in the fine-slicing of the value chain and the placement of separate activities in the most optimal locations. This international reallocation of the value chain has also increasingly shifted towards the unbundling of activities previously vertically integrated and locally concentrated in the home market, such as R&D activities (e.g. Helpman, 2006; Rugman, Verbeke, & Yuan, 2011). Internationalizing firms have very specific objectives that are related to their value chain activities (Cantwell & Mudambi, 2005) and consequently investments are driven towards locations that cater to the needs of the specific value chain activity wherein the investment is situated. Most location studies however pool all these different kinds of value chain activities and do not take this heterogeneity into account.
Geographic unit of analysis
A final weakness of the existing location literature is that most studies are conducted at the national level. This approach however contrasts with the stylized fact that multinational firms take regions across multiple countries into consideration when they decide on locations for foreign direct investments (Beugelsdijk & Mudambi, 2013; Crescenzi, et al., 2014; Thursby & Thursby, 2009). This can be explained by the large heterogeneity of regions within countries and the fact that regions across different countries are sometimes closer substitutes than regions within national borders. Only more recently there has been a shift towards subnational analyses (e.g. Abramovsky, Harrison, & Simpson, 2007; Autant-Bernard, 2006).
The literature has also documented that multinational tend to concentrate in specific locations. Empirical research has shown that multinational corporations clearly gravitate toward global cities (e.g. Goerzen, Asmussen, & Nielsen, 2013). Global cities are seen as important investment locations for multinational firms, as they often serve as command and control nodes in the “global reach” of worldwide production by large corporations (Friedmann, 1986; Taylor et al., 2009). Although there is abundant evidence on the importance of global cities for MNCs, the literature examining location decisions at the global city level remains remarkable scarce. Additionally, existing research has treated these cities as a selected group of locations sharing a number of salient characteristics, but has not focused on the heterogeneity within this group (Goerzen et al., 2013).
This dissertation comprises 3 location studies addressing the issues and research gaps listed above. The first study (Chapter 2) focuses on R&D location choices and examines how locational traits are affected by knowledge protection strategies of incumbent firms. The second study (Chapter 3) examines R&D location decisions and focuses on how the attractiveness of a region could be positive influenced by connectivity to other international locations due to the international knowledge networks of MNCs active in the region. How the geographic distribution of the investing firm’s knowledge base influences its location decision is investigated as well. The final study (Chapter 4) analyses Chinese manufacturing investments and takes both the ownership structure of the investing firm (POEs vs SOEs) and the different role models that can be followed in their outward investment behavior into account. All studies have been conducted at the finer grained subnational level. The first study has been conducted at the NUTS-1 level in the EU-15. The second study focuses on global cities in 33 countries, while the last study examines NUTS-2 regions in the EU-28. The three studies are introduced in more detail below.status: Publishe
Innovation initiative within foreign subsidiaries in South Korea: Determinants and outcomes
No full textMultinationals van opkomende en ontwikkelde markten: Oorsprong en evolutie van competitieve voordelen. Innovatie en Strategie
No full textThe thesis combines different streams of literature on brokerage, recognizing the role of brokers in facilitating research interactions between emerging and developed market firms. Specifically, in this work, it is argued that brokerage is critical in mitigating resource dependencies between partners, coping with partners' psychic distances and managing institutional complexities - competing institutional logics of partners - in collaborative arrangements. The aim is to investigate how brokers and industrial firms can more effectively develop and sustain competitive advantage in this set-up of the collaboration.
For that purpose, we have collected quantitative and qualitative data on research activities which contribute to the understanding of brokerage processes and structures in different contexts. By integrating brokerage structures and processes in tandem, the thesis shows that the academic research should move beyond the structural conceptions of brokerage. It is evident that both structural and process solutions reflect and predict the brokers' actions and their impact. Furthermore, the results suggest the existence of boundary conditions for strategies of brokers and, therefore broker effectiveness. This is a strong contribution to the literature on brokerage as much of the work around broker effectiveness does not focus on the contingencies of broker strategies.
The first study provides a better understanding of the mechanisms and the conditions under which brokers can effectively deploy tertius broker strategies. It shows that the effective development of the tertius broker strategies is contingent on partner type, business integration and product readiness. In the second study, we analyze how psychic distance antecedents at individual-level combine to influence the managerial preferences for collaborative structures. In the study, two different complementary methods are applied: traditional linear method (PLS) and new configurational method (fsQCA). Despite their different advantages, both of the methods give strong evidence of complex relationships between the antecedents. Finally, the last study investigates how industrial firms experience and manage institutional complexity through brokerage. Taking social, structural and procedural lenses as the leading perspectives for understanding the process, the study shows that mechanisms of brokers are subject to change according to different factors.status: Publishe
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
For strategic environmental sustainability not to be lost in translation(s) anymore
No full textThe increasing scale of environmental externalities related to technological firms’ activities shows the limits of today’s economic system and development path. It forces these firms to integrate environmental sustainability concerns not only in their operations but also strategically in their business processes, to ensure legitimacy and the protection of their competitive advantage. However, a strategic implementation of environmentally-oriented initiatives remains difficult given the poor understanding of human and non-human actors’ interactions taking place during that process. Environmental sustainability strategy development and implementation can be seen as an organisational process of change. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model that combines some key elements of Callon and Latour’s actor-network theory and Lewin’s model of change. On the one hand, actor-network theory proposes a sociology of science in which technology is not to be seen as an autonomous artefact. Therefore, the strategic integration of environmental sustainability issues in technological business processes is understood as a co-constitution and transformation of artefacts, actors and practices within the firm. It focuses on how socio-technical actor-networks are created in the organisation through a process of translation(s) ¬- i.e. interpretation(s) that every actor makes of other actors present in the network. On the other hand, Lewin’s three-step model of change highlights some useful stages (unfreeze-move-refreeze) that can be followed by practitioners to successfully plan, design and implement change in a structured way, as well as keep track of the achievements attained. We show that their complementary aspects of emergent and planned approaches to environmental sustainability change ensure a better understanding of actors’ interactions taking place in the technological organisation. While actor-network theory reinforces Lewin’s model in a dynamic and iterative way, Lewin’s model brings some structure to the numerous translation processes taking place in the organisation and hence, eases the transmission of actor-network theory perspectives to the practitioners.<br/
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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