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Summarizes experience gained from implementation and review of the needs assessment process in 12 client‐driven applied research studies and puts it forth as a set of propositions which relate to decisions concerning organization and societal economic development projects. Suggests that a needs‐assessment process must be client‐owned, pragmatic and result in outcomes which are usable and perceived by stakeholders to be important. As well as being grounded in economic and research theory, a needs assessment must contain definable data sets comprising skill/knowledge profiles categorized into some usable format. The 12 studies provide support for these ideas, validating models characterized by intensive involvement and topdown/bottom‐up consultation developed in the authors′ previous publications.

The purpose of the paper is to review issues and concepts related to the use of knowledge in business for the purpose of generating profit, and show their application in relation to the author's own company, Ricardo. As far as possible, both the conditions common to other knowledge companies, and those unique to Ricardo, are identified, with a view to furthering the management of knowledge by others.

The paper approaches the topic of knowledge management from a case‐study angle, with a view to identifying the knowledge inputs into the company's work, its processing of those inputs, and the generation of outputs in the form of profitable knowledge products and services.

The paper finds that knowledge is presented as a differentiated concept with various levels and functions. Following a description of how the various types of knowledge are used by the author's company, some of the lessons to be learned are listed.

The paper offers, both explicitly and by implication, some useful guidelines for KM practitioners.

The paper reveals how far theoretical concepts, such as tacit and explicit knowledge, knowledge bases and knowledge or learning communities, are reflected in the real world situation of Ricardo.

The sudden COVID-19 epidemic in 2019 has frustrated China's overall economy, and the implementation and development of the National Fitness Program has encountered huge obstacles. At a new historical starting point, in order to realize the dream of becoming a powerful country in sports, it is necessary to transform the successful experience gained since the reform and opening up into regular understanding and systematic theories, so as to make a theoretical response to the new contradictions and challenges faced in development and give full play to the National Fitness has comprehensive values and multiple functions in improving people's health, promoting people's all-round development, promoting economic and social development and demonstrating the country's cultural soft power.

Taking the topic of national fitness as an example, this paper sets out from the three dimensions of knowledge input, knowledge output and knowledge production, using citation analysis, social network analysis, co-word analysis and cluster analysis, to measure the characteristics and knowledge structure of interdisciplinary knowledge exchange.

China's national fitness is still in the primary development stage, and the strong boost of the national top-level policy is the biggest driving force of its development, driven by the policy together with the settlement of many major events, constantly improving and enriching the wings. The main body of knowledge production on the topic of national fitness is mainly colleges and universities, with low participation of government and enterprises, high degree of cooperation among authors, obvious interdisciplinary characteristics and strong application of research themes.

This study provides a strong theoretical basis for the promotion of the Healthy China strategy. Especially under the influence of COVID-19, this paper can contribute to the comprehensive value and multimodal functions of national fitness in improving the health of people, promoting economic and social development and demonstrating the soft power of national culture.

This chapter treats the management’s understanding of the potential of managing interaction between product innovation and learning. The chapter draws its empirical results from interviews with the management, project leaders, and other employees working on product innovations in five manufacturing firms visited three to four times during 2001–2002. It is shown that the managed interaction between innovation and learning is promoted by explicit strategic consideration and most strongly by a knowledge management strategy. Important positive and negative structural conditions are highlighted.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of imported intermediate inputs on innovation performance, differentiating among types of innovation output (product and process innovation) and considering both family and non-family firms in the Spanish context.

This paper uses an unbalanced panel of 1963 firms in the Spanish manufacturing sector (13,155 observations; 2006–2016) that can be identified as family or non-family firms. The authors apply a recently developed methodology (conditional mixed process model) that takes into account the possible relationships among the dependent variables to a panel bivariate probit model with robust standard errors.

Importing intermediate inputs is an important source of process innovation for all firms, but not of product innovations. Significant differences were found between family and non-family firms in favor of the family type.

This paper breaks down the family state into two categories (belonging to a family group or not) because the database does not contain information regarding the percentage of family ownership or the number of family members in the management structure. Moreover, the research is context specific.

These results will be useful for firms that are considering the value of importing intermediate inputs as a strategy to improve their process innovations, particularly for family firms.

Family firms are more successful in the utilization of imported intermediate inputs to achieve greater innovation performance. If family firms are more competent in leveraging their intermediate input imports in innovation performance, it should contribute to increasing business performance.

The research on imports takes into account the different impacts of intermediate imports depending on innovation performance (product innovation vs process innovation) and the nature of the firm (family firms vs non-family firms).

This paper aims to prove the validity and necessity of knowledge stickiness and knowledge investment level.

Empirical study method is taken in this investigation which focuses on knowledge‐related industries' workers and proves the validity and necessity of knowledge stickiness and knowledge investment level with SPSS13.0 software.

The authors confirm the positive correlation between knowledge contribution and sharing residual claims based on management, and also confirm the positive correlation between knowledge stickiness, knowledge investment level and sharing residual claims based on technology. However, a negative correlation on management is also confirmed.

After an analysis on the incentive distortion caused by the information asymmetry between the principal and agent in the traditional incentive mode, a residual claims sharing structure containing knowledge contract is put forward.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a link between entrepreneurial activity on the one hand, and industry evolution and economic growth on the other. The role that entrepreneurship plays in innovative activity is explained. The link between entrepreneurship and industry evolution through the spillover of knowledge in generating entrepreneurial activity is analyzed. This implies that the relationship between entrepreneurship and growth is identified. In particular, this paper finds that entrepreneurship generates a positive pulse in the evolution of industries in such a way that fosters economic growth.

Globalization has shifted the comparative advantage in the OECD countries away from being based on traditional inputs of production, such as land, labor and capital, towards knowledge. This has triggered a divergence between the competitiveness of firms and the competitiveness of locations. As the strategic management of firms dictated a response to globalization of outward foreign direct investment combined with employment downsizing at high cost locations, public policy has responded by developing the strategic management of places. Policy to promote entrepreneurship has emerged as playing a central role in the strategic management of places, because entrepreneurial activity is the conduit between investments in knowledge and economic growth at the particular location. However, due to the two sources of market failure associated with investments in knowledge and entrepreneurial activity identified in this paper, private agents will tend to under invest in entrepreneurial activity. A major goal of the strategic management of places is to pursue policies that will compensate for this market failure by promoting knowledge-based entrepreneurship as a vehicle for the employment growth and global competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to explain why and how globalization has triggered the emergence of a new type of public policy – the strategic management of places – and the central role that entrepreneurship plays in this new policy.

Begins with a brief review of research in the area of performance, with particular emphasis on design and product development, highlighting the main weaknesses in work to date. Then presents a fundamental and generic model of performance, related to knowledge‐based activities in design, which describes performance in terms of its key elements, efficiency and effectiveness, and provides a basis for modelling performance across different process levels. Evolves this model further to describe performance measurement and management in design development. Concludes that it is not possible to distinguish the efficiency of the design activity from that of design management, and that, in addition, efficiency appears to be inherent to an activity, but is difficult to measure.

This manuscript aims to integrate the relationship and knowledge-based theoretical perspectives of open innovation to provide a framework that identifies and classifies eight critical dimensions that influence the effectiveness of interfirm open innovation.

The literature on interfirm open innovation is reviewed. Internal firm factors and external interfirm factors of open innovation are explored.

The manuscript identifies four internal firm factors of absorptive capacity, control of knowledge input, relational capability and coordination capability. Further, the synthesis identifies four external firm factors of distribution of knowledge input, appropriation of knowledge output, network position and network diversity.

The organizing framework facilitates the development of eight research propositions to guide future empirical investigation. Moreover, the findings aid managers in understanding what dimensions they should consider to improve the effectiveness of their interfirm open innovation activities.

By considering both the relationship and knowledge-based perspectives, the manuscript integrates various perspectives of open innovation to provide direction for practicing managers and for future research on interfirm open innovation.