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This study aims to explore the relationship between geographic search and business model innovation and proposed a contingent framework to focus on how governmental networking and environment turbulence are interdependent moderate the relationship between geographic search and business model innovation.

A large-scale questionnaire survey was carried out among the firms in three high-tech parks of the Pearl River Delta, with a total of 287 firms as empirical samples. Hypotheses are tested using ordinary least squares analyzes on hierarchical multiple regression to find out how geographic search can drive business model innovation generations.

The empirical results showed that the more frequent geographic search is, the more favorable it is for firms to generate innovative business models, and firms may be more effective in geographic searching and business model innovation with better governmental networking. However, the above relationship may be weakened if the environment turbulence in emerging markets is further considered. It was argued that firms must take into account both the positive effects of governmental networking and the negative effects of environmental turbulence in conducting a geographic search for external knowledge resources to generate innovative business models. The study results showed how and why governmental networking can be a key catalyst for firms to generate innovative business models.

This study contributes to the business model innovation literature by documenting the large-scale survey evidence that confirms the practicality of geographic search in the business model innovation generations. The findings advance previous studies in the business model innovation by identifying the moderating roles of governmental network and environment turbulence that predict business model innovation behaviors in the emerging market.

The results indicate that the geographic search can be easily operationalized for external resources acquisitions by managers in generating business model innovation. This has applications for external resource acquisitions on the basis of business model innovation in the emerging China market. In addition, to facilitate the business model innovation generations, the focus should be on critical contingency factors; on the one hand, to promote the continued use of external resources, the focus should be on enhancing benefits such as governmental networking.

The findings extend existing theory in three ways as the original value. First, the results show that geographic search is an important driver of business model innovation generations in an emerging market context. Second, this study is the first to take organizational learning and open innovation perspective to examine geographic search as a boundary-spanning search of external resources in business model innovation generations. Third, this study also explores the moderator role of governmental network and environmental turbulence on how to strengthen or impair the geographic search and business model innovation generations.

Public crisis often generates new knowledge that should be incorporated into a government’s macro-control to ensure the relief supply. From the perspective of public crisis knowledge management, the Chinese system of Government relief supplies can be considered as a special case of the knowledge system. This paper aims to investigate the supply and production mechanism of relief goods and explore the advantages of the Chinese system when a sudden public crisis occurs.

Under the Chinese system, the authors construct a relief supply chain model consisting of the Chinese Government, one manufacturer and one supplier, where the supplier has no capital constraints. Given the demand for relief goods, the government purchases from the manufacturer with a guide price. Then, the manufacturer decides on its order quantity and offers a wholesale price to the supplier. The supplier has a random capacity and decides on the level of knowledge acquisition to improve its capacity.

The authors first obtain the analytical solution for the manufacturer to motivate a high level of knowledge acquisition from the supplier. Specifically, the manufacturer’s optimal order quantity is equal to the demand and the optimal wholesale price has a cost-plus form that reimburses the supplier for its production cost and knowledge-acquisition cost. Next, the authors derive the optimal guide price for the government, which should be set to subsidize the manufacturer with a proportion of the sourcing cost. Finally, the authors compare the Chinese system with the market mechanism where the supplier has capital constraints and confirm that the Chinese system is more beneficial to both the manufacturer and the government.

Quantitative research on the Chinese system of Government relief supplies is difficult to be conducted. This paper provides feasible and practical methods to quantify the benefits of the Chinese system. The results reveal that the Chinese system is an effective mechanism of public crisis knowledge management, which can be helpful to the government’s policy-making in practice.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how middle managers respond to the career challenges caused by environmental regulation. In particular, this paper examines whether environmental regulation strength is positively related to middle managers’ openness toward change, and whether middle managers’ openness toward change is positively related to proactive behavior. Furthermore, the moderating role of top managers’ bottom-line mentality in these two relationships is examined.

Cross-sectional survey research (n=155) was conducted. During a training program, data were collected from 155 middle managers from a listed company that manufactures primary products. With these data the authors examined the main relationship and also explored the moderating effect of top managers’ bottom-line mentality.

Analysis of the findings indicates that perceived environmental regulation strength influences middle managers’ openness toward change and consequently their proactive behavior. In addition, top managers’ bottom-line mentality moderates both the link between environmental regulation strength and openness toward change and the link between openness toward change and proactive behavior.

The findings of this study reveal how environmental regulation induces middle managers’ proactive behavior, and the influence of top managers’ mentality on how middle managers respond to environmental regulation both cognitively and behaviorally.