The spatial configuration of innovation networks in China

GeoJournal, Jan 2018

China is rising and gradually developing into an innovation-oriented economy. This transition is fueled by public and private investment in education and by increasing inputs into science and technology. Little attention, however, has been paid to the great differences in China-specific context peculiarity. Hence, the paper assesses Chinese innovation networks using a comprehensive analytical model that includes network configuration, regional environment, government interference and firm attributes. The empirical analysis examines China’s machinery manufacturing industry to test the determinants of the spatial character of Chinese innovation networks based on questionnaire surveys and illustrative cases. Our study finds that Chinese innovation networks are affected not only by innovation resource endowments and firm attributes, but also by government interference and regional culture. Regarding the influence of regional culture, the typical Northern culture with the importance of guanxi plays an important role in the process of searching for partners and makes the innovation network and interpersonal network interwoven. Firms’ ownership and innovation ability are the two essential variables to determine whether any of the regional elements are of significance.

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The spatial configuration of innovation networks in China

GeoJournal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708 The spatial configuration of innovation networks in China Guoqing Lyu 0 1 . Ingo Liefner 0 1 0 G. Lyu Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Science , Shanghai , China 1 G. Lyu (&) I. Liefner Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography, Leibniz University of Hannover , Hannover , Germany China is rising and gradually developing into an innovation-oriented economy. This transition is fueled by public and private investment in education and by increasing inputs into science and technology. Little attention, however, has been paid to the great differences in China-specific context peculiarity. Hence, the paper assesses Chinese innovation networks using a comprehensive analytical model that includes network configuration, regional environment, government interference and firm attributes. The empirical analysis examines China's machinery manufacturing industry to test the determinants of the spatial character of Chinese innovation networks based on questionnaire surveys and illustrative cases. Our study finds that Chinese innovation networks are affected not only by innovation resource endowments and firm attributes, but also by government interference and regional culture. Regarding the influence of regional culture, the typical Northern culture with the importance of guanxi plays an important role in the process of searching for partners and makes the innovation network and interpersonal network interwoven. Firms' ownership and innovation ability are the two essential variables to determine whether any of the regional elements are of significance. Innovation network; Regional environment; Government interference; Firm attributes; China; Introduction; Chinese innovation networks - Over the past two decades, a large body of scholars in economic geography has been preoccupied with research on the interactive influence between firms and regions (Sternberg and Arndt 2001; Storper and Venables 2004; Wang and Lin 2013; Fitjar and Rodr´ıguez-Pose 2015) . Significant theoretical advancements have been made to understand the dynamics of network composition and spatial character (Hennemann et al. 2012; Broekel 2015; Boschma et al. 2017) . Although there is a heated debate among different research strands, an agreement has been reached that innovation is fundamentally the consequence of the interaction of firms with their cooperative partners in nearby or distant locations. Thus far, however, the existing theoretical frameworks and empirical results have largely been based on the studies in developed or western countries (Howells and Bessant 2012; Zhang and Peck 2016) , which calls into question whether the findings can explain the issues of emerging economies, particularly those of China (Wei and Liefner 2012) . China is rising and gradually developing into an innovation-oriented economy. This transition is fueled by public and private investment in education and by increasing inputs into science, technology and R&D (Liefner et al. 2016) . Meanwhile, in the case of China, the ongoing innovation process allows the coexistence of a specific variety of actors, such as public R&D institutes, universities, state-owned and private firms et al. Little attention, however, has been paid to the great differences in China-specific context peculiarity (Hu and Lin 2013; Kafouros et al. 2015) . Firstly, the Chinese government is actively involved in innovation activities not only in finance and other types of support, but also as an important factor influencing the trend of the network configuration, for example with regard to the types of innovation activities carried out and partners chosen for innovation (Liefner and Zeng 2008; Hu and Lin 2013; Liefner and Jessberger 2016) . Secondly, although some Chinese privately owned enterprises (POEs hereafter) have been successful in terms of innovation, state-owned enterprises (SOEs hereafter) normally dominate in certain industries and easily gain access to large-scale subsidies (Peighambari et al. 2014; Du and Mickiewicz 2016) . They hence possess the ownership-specific advantages for obtaining innovation resources and benefit more easily from the construction of multi-scale innovation networks (Liefner and Zeng 2016) . Thirdly, China’s science and technology system is hierarchically organized (Andersson et al. 2014; Huggins et al. 2014) . Finally, regions differ enormously with respect to culture, for example a flexible Southern Chinese culture versus a stability-oriented Northern Chinese culture, which affects the strengths and functions of ties between firms and their potential cooperation partners (Park and Luo 2001; Liefner and Zeng 2008; Fu et al. 2013) . One particular question hence still remains regarding an analytical framework that explains the structure of innovation networks in China in a more specific and comprehensive manner. In this paper, we thus examine the major factors affecting the spatial character (...truncated)


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Guoqing Lyu, Ingo Liefner. The spatial configuration of innovation networks in China, GeoJournal, 2018, pp. 1-18, DOI: 10.1007/s10708-017-9844-1