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“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

One of the more important and interesting phenomena in international business in recent times is the upgrading and catchup of firms from emerging economies. How do these firms upgrade and catchup? This paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on upgrading and catchup by emerging economy firms and develops a model and testable propositions to advance research on the topic.

We link the exploration–exploitation framework of organizational learning to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a developing economy. SMEs in a developing economy generally lack abundant resources and capabilities because of an evolving set of industrial and environmental regulations. Studying two SMEs in China, we argue that their approaches to balancing exploration and exploitation depend on the development stages of the SMEs and their industrial and environmental contexts. In particular, we propose a four-stage framework that unfolds via initiation, innovation, transformation, and expansion. In this framework, SMEs balance exploration and exploitation by adopting temporal separation and organizational separation sequentially. We also find that SMEs may benefit from exploring a narrow scope of products and exploiting them in a wide market scope.

Many companies worldwide are currently involved in open innovation processes (OIPs), through which they aim to collect innovative insights and ideas from the crowd. The phenomenon has grown – and is destined to continue to grow – massively. As a result, there is strong interest from scholars and practitioners in rebuilding the relevant processes and developing a set of best practices. What seems to be missing from this developing topic of research is a focus on its antecedents and consequences. Since the phenomenon is so new, a focus on its consequences seems untimely. A focus on its antecedents, on the other hand, seems both promising and intriguing.

The fact that more and more companies are involved in OIPs suggests that they have already developed an organizational open innovation (OI) culture. If an OI culture already exists, how widespread is it and to what extent is it shared among those involved in knowledge ecosystems? With this question in mind, it seems worthwhile to investigate whether OI is supported culturally at both social and individual levels.

Finally, this chapter summarizes the state of the art of OI culture at social, organizational and individual levels and considers how an OI culture developed at company level may serve to drive its development at the social and individual levels.

South Asian countries have recently shown tremendous advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) deployment and have been identified as one of the fastest-growing regions in the world. This chapter reviews 43 state-of-the-art scholarly articles on the role of ICT in accelerating economic growth by fostering innovations in South Asian countries. A seven-step approach to the literature review is used for synthesizing relevant data. The findings indicate that although many South Asian countries understood ICT innovations as an approach that provides a competitive edge to business firms and the country's economic growth, their full potential remains untapped due to many barriers. Some significant barriers include the digital divide, ICT infrastructure, existing ICT policies, and data governance and social trust. The results of this chapter would help policymakers understand the vital role of ICT in fostering innovation and uplifting economic growth in the South Asian region.

In this chapter, we investigate whether innovation, as measured by an aggregate weighted innovation score, impacts on nursing home performance. We employ multiple measures of performance, including occupancy rate, payer mix, and the number of deficiencies cited on the annual Medicare/Medicaid recertification survey. Arguing from a contingency perspective, we hypothesize that the performance of nursing homes that engage in minimal innovation will not be significantly different from those that do not innovate at all. However, those that engage in more extensive innovation will have superior performance. Using Online Survey, Certification, and Reporting data from 1997 to 2002, we conducted a series of logit regressions, controlling for organizational and market characteristics that could influence nursing home performance. The results of these analyses support our hypotheses. From a theoretical perspective, this evidence is consistent with contingency theory arguments that organizations that are not responsive to a changing environment will experience declining performance. From a managerial perspective, these results support the importance of the entrepreneurial spirit in the nursing home industry.

This paper examines the extent to which different sources of ideas for innovation are associated with novelty of innovation outcomes. We measure the novelty of product innovation using three well-established categories, ranging from highly novel new-to-world products to new-to-firm products that are essentially imitative, with products that are new-to-country (but not the world) being an intermediary category. In turn we investigate how knowledge derived from different external and internal (within-firm) sources of ideas can help firms increase innovation with different degrees of novelty. Our empirical analyses are conducted on a large sample of manufacturing firms from the South American emerging market of Colombia and show that many of the same sources of knowledge – such as scientific sources, production departments and managers – are associated with higher innovation in all three categories of novelty. However, some sources – notably external clients and internal interdisciplinary groups – are more significantly associated with more novel innovation than imitation. The implications of these findings for the literatures on innovation and imitation, and innovation by emerging market firms are discussed.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze, from the Latin American thought approach (LTA), the ideas that were produced after World War II on innovation and entrepreneurship in Latin America. It should be mentioned, from now on, that in this approach the topics, phenomena, or problems are always contextualized within a broader problem to be solved, namely that of development. To this end, two axes of analysis are addressed from which the analytical bases, approaches, key concepts, and public policy proposals are located. The first axis explores the proposals related to the development and the idea of the center-periphery model. The second analyzes the role of innovation and entrepreneurship based on the industrialization model, to identify the problems or inadequacies of Latin American entrepreneurship. The proposal emphasizes the need to contextualize entrepreneurship in the broad dimension of development. In this journey, it will be observed that the role of the entrepreneur has been of relevance for the import substitution industrialization (ISI) model in its beginnings by assigning her/him the task of supplying the domestic market by substituting imports, to reduce degrees of dependence in an asymmetric economic world; in the maturity stage of the model, the need for entrepreneurship was affirmed by incorporating innovation. Briefly, we will see that when the model changed, mainly in the 1980s, the firm would assume the role of a resource center for technological accumulation to achieve competitiveness and significantly insert itself in the export market. From Latin America's history in search for development, we can conclude that innovative business entrepreneurship has been less successful and less effective than Latin America requires.

Agri-biotech multinational enterprises (MNEs) are persisting to push genetically modified plant varieties (GMV) worldwide including emerging countries as a technological solution for sustainable development. However, in emerging countries, the structure and effectiveness of regulation and compliance measures to ensure human and environmental safety are much less developed. There are three types of concerns: the economic risks faced by farmers while using existing low-yielding conventional seed varieties, in the face of inadequate institutional mechanisms and safety nets, the long-term environmental risks, and finally, risks posed by other possible externalities. In an attempt to provide some insight on the aforementioned debate, this chapter focuses on a commercially successful GMV—namely genetically modified cotton, also referred to as Bt cotton. The literature on adoption of Bt cotton is first examined, and its findings are confronted with the reality of the introduction and diffusion of Bt cotton in India to derive inferences on how MNE and emerging countries’ governments can manage coexistence. Our findings indicate that in order to be successful, MNEs have to establish the sociopolitical legitimacy of GMV through investment in outreach with regulatory authorities, government departments dealing with the environmental and bio safety, farmer groups, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). MNEs also have to keep in mind that pricing and high technology fee can become an impediment for the legitimization of technology. Finally, MNEs can partner with NGOs to educate and accompany farmers to maximize their livelihood, while preserving the ecological sustainability of their farm lands.