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Based on social influence theory (SIT) and social capital theory, this paper aims to explore the mediating role of entrepreneurial networks between technological entrepreneurs' political skills and entrepreneurial performance and whether market dynamics positively moderates this relationship.

This study collected data from 454 technological entrepreneurs in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Zhengzhou in China and examined four hypotheses by hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping analysis in an empirical design.

Results reveal that technological entrepreneurs' political skills not only have a direct positive impact on entrepreneurial performance (β = 0.544, t = 12.632, p < 0.001), but also have an indirect positive impact on entrepreneurial performance through entrepreneurial networks (β = 0.473, t = 10.636, p < 0.001). Entrepreneurial networks play a mediating role between entrepreneurs' political skills and entrepreneurial performance with 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals [0.034, 0.015]. Market dynamics plays a moderating role in the relationship among technological entrepreneurs' political skills, entrepreneurial networks and entrepreneurial performance (entrepreneurial performance: β = 0.190, t = 4.275, p < 0.001; entrepreneurial networks: β = 0.135, t = 4.455, p < 0.001). When market dynamics is high, technological entrepreneurs' political skills have a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial networks (simple slope = 0.309, t = 7.656, p < 0.001); but when market dynamics is low, there is no significant correlation between political skills and entrepreneurial networks (simple slope = 0.039, t = 0.966, p > 0.05).

The study relies on self-reported data from single informants. Although the severity of common method bias is tested through two methods, future research designs should avoid the influence of common method bias. Future research should adopt a vertical tracking design, collect data from multiple sources and use subjective assessment and objective indicators to measure variables. In addition, the applicability of the results outside China is worth further empirical exploration. Therefore, the authors hope that future studies can replicate the research to different countries, different cultural backgrounds and different organizational sections to explore the generalizability of the results.

The findings provide useful suggestions for entrepreneurs, who can use political skills to build a strong entrepreneurial network to improve their entrepreneurial performance. The results also suggest that entrepreneurs should pay more attention to cultivating and developing their political skills through methods such as training and practice. In addition, the conclusion is of great implications to enrich the content of entrepreneurship education and guide entrepreneurship practice.

These findings enrich SIT and social capital theory by providing the empirical evidence of the effect of entrepreneurs' political skills on entrepreneurial performance through entrepreneurial network. They also provide deeper insights into market dynamics research by uncovering the moderating role of market dynamics in the relationship between entrepreneurs' political skills, entrepreneurial networks and entrepreneurial performance.

The environment in high-tech industries is highly dynamic, and after COVID-19, it has become even more unpredictable. Hence, it has become critical for firms to develop strategies to cope with a highly dynamic environment. This paper aims to analyze how the impact of the scientific collaboration networks with URIs (universities and research institutes) on firm innovation performance is contingent on technological and market dynamics.

Using a sample of 174 Chinese firms in the new-energy vehicle industry during 2004–2015, the authors applied a random-effects negative binomial modeling approach to model these relationships.

A broad and strong scientific collaboration network promotes firm innovation network effects are contingent on technological and market dynamics. While technological dynamics strengthen the effect market dynamics weaken it due to the different purposes of collaboration for firms and URIs.

Firms should adjust the structure of scientific collaboration networks with URIs when facing different environments. The government should encourage firms to jointly research with diverse URIs and play an active role in stabilizing market environments.

This study contributes to the academic debate on university-industry scientific collaborations. Applying the temporary competitive advantage (TCA) framework, we provide nuances to the literature that studies the factors that condition the effects of networks. This study also adds to the research on firm scientific collaboration networks by measuring networks based on the coauthorship between firms and URIs.

The purpose of this mainly conceptual paper is to analyze key changes in the institutional setting for standardization and to discuss what they indicate about further developments of the mobile sector. The intention is that this conceptual analysis will complement and contextualize the analysis of Nordic players found in the other papers of this special issue.

The paper is concerned with issues of industrial organization. The paper presents a treatment of industrial dynamics in them mobile telecom sector and the changing role of standards in it. We approach the substantial changes in the mobile telecom sector, focusing on the correspondence of the changes in the standards system to overall industry dynamics. Empirical information from the Symbian case is used to illustrate the hypothesis of standardization process and of the industry at large.

The paper identifies changing patters in the organization of technological standardization which represents a microcosm of the larger reorganization of the sector. Nordic actors, whose present position owes much to success in linking capabilities to sequential mobile standards. The paper draws out implications of the limits to “intergenerational leveraging” in standards.

The major contribution of the paper is to focus on changes in the organization of the standardization process in order to discuss the industrial dynamics of an industry which is undergoing a period of rapid change. Its reference to industrial dynamics perspective allows it to link the literature on dominant design to the field of standards research.

The purpose of the paper is to portrait how members of cluster organizations (COs) perceive the role of COs in enabling them to accumulate technological capability (TC) significant for their innovation.

The authors report the findings from their qualitative study based on an analysis of four COs. The organizational inertia and absorptive capacity theories are the theoretical underpinning of the research.

The study shows that the dynamics of TC of the cluster companies included in the study sample relates to their initial level of TC and cluster cooperation. The companies with relatively low initial TC increase it through COs if the clusters offer comparatively high benefits. On the other hand, those COs' members that present relatively high initial TC advance it, provided that the external knowledge and other benefits they can absorb in their clusters are suited to their technological trajectories.

The research is preliminary in nature and portrays how firms with different levels of TC cooperate within COs and how this cooperation translates into TC improvements. The findings add to the state-of-the-art knowledge on the link between TC and absorptive capacity of companies involved in COs by depicting the role of COs in providing knowledge and other cluster benefits that help cluster companies to accumulate TC and improve their absorptive capacity. Nevertheless, the applied methodology does not allow the authors to generalize the findings.

The coordinators of COs should skillfully shape the levels of cluster cooperation, matching them to the desired level of the cluster companies. They should create smaller subgroups composed of companies with similar TC, which may translate into its higher dynamic.

The knowledge about the role of COs in providing cluster benefits that help cluster companies to accumulate TC and improve their absorptive capacity is still insufficient. The study shed new light on the key role of the levels of cluster cooperation and the types of commitment related to them (i.e. technological effort), which may be a matter of importance in the dynamics of TC accumulation.

This paper aims to develop a causal feedback structure that explains the dynamics of entrepreneurship development in Iran’s photovoltaic (PV) technological innovation system (TIS) to design effective policy interventions for fostering PV innovation.

This study adopts the system dynamics approach to develop the causal structure model. The methodology follows a systematic method to elicit the causal structure from qualitative data gathered by interviewing several stakeholders with extensive knowledge about different aspects of Iran’s PV TIS.

Lack of technological knowledge and financial resources within Iranian PV panel-producing firms are the main barriers to entrepreneurship development in Iran’s PV TIS. This study proposes two policy enforcement mechanisms to tackle these problems. The proposed feedback mechanisms contribute to the domestic PV market size and knowledge transfer from public research organizations to the PV industry.

The proposed policy mechanisms aid Iranian policymakers in designing effective policy interventions stimulating innovation in Iran’s PV industry.

The main contributions of this study include conceptualizing the causal structure capturing entrepreneurship dynamics in emerging PV TIS and proposing policy mechanisms fostering entrepreneurship and innovation in PV sectors.

Understanding when entrants might have an advantage over an industry’s incumbent firms in developing and adopting new technologies is a question which several scholars have explained in terms of technological capabilities or organizational dynamics. This paper proposes that the value network—the context within which a firm competes and solves customers’ problems—is an important factor affecting whether incumbent or entrant firms will most successfully innovate. In a study of technology development in the disk drive industry, the authors found that incumbents led the industry in developing and adopting new technologies of every sort identified by earlier scholars—at component and architectural levels; competency-enhancing and competency-destroying; incremental and radical—as long as the technology addressed customers’ needs within the value network in which the incumbents competed. Entrants led in developing and adopting technologies which addressed user needs in different, emerging value networks. It is in these innovations, which disrupted established trajectories of technological progress in established markets, that attackers proved to have an advantage. The rate of improvement in product performance which technologists provide may exceed the rate of improvement demanded in established markets. This mismatch between trajectories enables firms entering emerging value networks subsequently to attack the industry’s established markets as well.

Demonstrates the relevance of a stages methodology as a basis for understanding and analysing the evolutionary metamorphosis leading to the current Russian malaise. Addresses the advantages and disadvantages of the methodology, such as the unilinear fallacy, and analyses economic stagnation and decline in the context of the dynamics of culture evolution in the stage of modern economic growth. Given the Kuznetsian emphasis on a science‐fed technology, how then to explain the lack of Russian permeability to that technological flow? Many variables, such as excessive military spending, nationalism, rigid centralization, ideology, and so on, enter into such an analytical purview. It appears that neither tsarist nor Soviet Russia was able to create a culture adequately permeable to the dynamics of an ongoing science‐fed technological flow. The basic problem for Russia to overcome today is one of a cultural lag. A greater democratization of social and economic organization, concomitant with the needs of a modern industrial society, appears in order.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new classification of rules-driven sports and technology-driven sports that suggests different models of how sports develop. This paper outlines some key aspects of an evolutionary view of sports economics research and, separately, an institutional view of sports economic research.

This paper is a conceptual/theoretical piece rather than an empirical analysis of a research question. The authors scaffold a proposed analytic framework that is a combination of evolutionary economics and new institutional economics.

A new dynamic approach to the study of sports industries is called for. The authors observe that sports and sports industries exhibit dynamic qualities but in the study of sports there is no analogue of “industrial dynamics” as in economics. What is missing is the field of “evolutionary sports dynamics.” To build this, the authors frame a new evolutionary approach to the study of the sports economy and sports industries – by examining the evolution of sports, their industries, and the complex industrial ecosystems they operate in, through the lens of institutional and evolutionary economics.

The paper establishes a theoretical basis for a “New Economics of Sports” – as a shift in the types of questions that sports economics seeks to answer. These are away from “sports statics” – as a branch of applied economics of industrial organization and optimal allocation of sports resources (ala Rottenberg, 1956; Neale, 1964) – and toward concern with the economics of “sports dynamics.” The prime questions are less with the optimal organization of existing sports, and more toward understanding the origin of new sports and the evolutionary life cycles of sports.

This paper aims to analyse the viability of production processes in the framework of three industries, referred to here as “automotive”, “machine-tool” and “other transport material”. This idea is of interest as a result of the cognitive convergence that has arisen from the widespread of information and communication technologies in the technical solutions used by most of the product fields that make up the manufacturing industry.

Under the framework of evolutionary theory and based on the cognitive composition of the technical solutions used by the industries studied, this paper has drawn up technology profiles for those industries from the viewpoint of formal logic. These profiles will help us to analyse their potential and difficulties so as to bridge the cognitive gap and enabling them to access new paths and set up processes to diversify their output. Interviews with company management staff and high-ranking experts have provided us with highly useful information to help us complete the theoretical reflection and check it against expected behaviour patterns.

The results confirm that firms in the industries studies find it difficult to drive forward diversification processes. The analysis provides a theoretical explanation for the empirical results that can be found in the literature on the extent to which path dependency processes explain technology dynamics.

The limitations of this study lie on the one hand in the small number of firms interviewed (it would be useful to extend the sample to include other medium- and high-technology industries to see whether the results are confirmed) and on the other hand, in the possibility that the Covid-19 crisis may affect results, investment decisions and access to financial resources, and thus, upset plans for diversification.

There is a consensus that decision-making in general, and in management in particular, is plagued by unpredictability, risk and uncertainty (Baldwin et al., 2005; Bergh et al., 2011). Managers making deliberate strategic choices – which usually require long time horizons and involve high risk (Perello-Marin et al., 2013) – need to know whether the competitive future of their firms lies mainly in product innovation (diversification), in process and organisational innovation, in the internationalisation of production, in mergers or in other, alternative paths (Sydow et al., 2009). This study presents empirical evidence of the possibilities and difficulties faced by firms based on their technology profiles. This is a complex approach that calls for more research effort if it is to become an option for enhancing resilience and flexibility at firms and strengthening their ability to react to changes. According to Raynor (2002) diversification, understood dynamically, provides a way for companies competing in especially turbulent industries to hedge against uncertain future reconfigurations of industry boundaries. Palich et al. (2000) state that compared with single-business firms, firms engaging in related diversification are able to exploit synergies across product units by consolidating business activities in manufacturing, marketing, raw material purchases and R&D, and thus, achieve both scale and scope economies.

The manuscript is absolutely original in terms of its approach and design and sets out to analyse industrial diversification processes on the basis of the cognitive characteristics of the technical solutions used by the various industries.

Integrating supplier innovation is considered an effective strategy to reduce uncertainty at the fuzzy front end (FFE). However, the large number of supplier innovation resources and the task environment forces buying firms to precisely identify more valuable or interesting innovation resources for integration. The impact of the interaction between supplier innovation and task environment on FFE performance needs to be further explored. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a contingency framework to examine the relationship between supplier innovation (technology-push and market-pull) and buying firm’s FFE performance in different task environments, with the aim of clarifying which supplier innovation resources should be integrated to create high FFE performance in the face of an uncertain task environment.

Survey data from new product development team leaders in Chinese high-tech firms were collected and analyzed. Furthermore, using multiple regression analysis, the relationship among supplier innovation, task environment and FFE performance was examined.

The results show that although both technology-push and market-pull supplier innovation can improve FFE performance, there are significant differences between the influences of these two types of supplier innovation in the face of different task environments.

Practical guidelines are provided for buyer managers on how to effectively identify the “best” supplier innovation resources to improving the effectiveness and efficiency of supplier involvement in the FFE.

This paper deepens the knowledge of identifying supplier innovation resources in the FFE and enriches the research on supplier-enable FFE innovation.