Based on the analysis of the thinking essence and methodology program of the new paradigm of scientific knowledge production in the era of big data, this paper points out that the big data-driven knowledge production mode has brought about some social problems, such as causing new social justice problems, strengthening the new monopoly of academic resources, shaping the new path dependence of knowledge production, and bringing new scientific research ethics disputes. Then, based on STS perspective, this paper deeply reflects on the root cause and nature of these social problems from data science and the new perspective of studies in science of science, new academic power in data capital construction, new interest distribution and balance relationship in new knowledge production mode, and value load of data science laws.
Based on the understanding of the history of technology cases and the gradual evolution of technology, three concepts of technology circle, technology layer and technology layer section have been proposed. Technology circle refers to the scope of geographical and cultural spatial distribution of a certain technology in a certain period of time; Technology layer refers to the superimposed and comparative relationship formed in the diachronic and synchronic evolution of technology circle relics in different times and regions. Technology layer section refers to tracing and comparing the technology relics existin different cultural layers from a certain time, revealing the evolution relationship of these technology relics, so as to reconstruct the technology evolution sequence. The above three concepts have clear indicative significance in the social history research of technology, the cross-cultural research of technology, and the source of technology, the search for intermediate links, and the branch of technology, which helps to promote the “spatial” research of technology history.
Under the new wave of technological revolution and industrial change, digital technologies and their products or services have become an effective means to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of industries. The driving mechanism of digital industry convergence is sorted out based on the supply and demand of digital inputs, and the paths and effects of digital industry convergence in China and the America are analyzed using the latest input-output tables of both countries. The study finds that China's digital industry (especially digital product manufacturing) is at the low end of the "smile curve" and the value-added rate of the industry is low. Path analysis based on the degree of convergence found that, China's digital industry mainly promotes the digital transformation of industry and agriculture with digital hardware and its delivery, and knowledge and technology-intensive manufacturing is the key of its convergence; while the America's digital industry mainly promotes the digital transformation of service industry with digital services, among which producer service is the key of its convergence. The analysis of convergence effects reveals that the core sectors that drive or induce value added in the digital industry in China and the America are knowledge- and technology-intensive manufacturing, construction, and social, producer, and distribution services, respectively, all from the key areas of digital convergence in both countries. And the penetration intensity of digital industry to traditional industries such as energy and resource-based industry is not high, and their value added is not strongly driven or induced by the latter, which is the area where the future convergence development of digital industries in both countries should focus on breaking through. In addition, the convergence of China's digital industry should also strengthen digital service input, explore new modes of application of digital and traditional factors, and expand the space of data valorization.
Can the construction of smart cities that promote high-quality development narrow county economic inequality? We used per-capita light intensity data from satellite inversion to calculate 21-year Gini coefficients for 2,851 counties in China, and examined the impact of smart city on county economic inequality and its mechanism by taking China's smart city pilot as a quasi-natural experiment. The findings are as follows: (1) Smart cities in China can reduce county economic inequality, and the results remain stable after testing; (2) Heterogeneity analysis shows that for counties with smaller city size and better economic development, smart city is more conducive to reducing economic inequality; (3) Mechanism analysis shows that the technology effect brought by smart city reduces the county economic inequality by improving the level of regional innovation, and the allocation effect reduces the county economic inequality by balanced allocation of capital factors and marginal allocation of land factors.
China’s economy is undergoing a transformation in recent years, how to promote high-quality economic development has become a concern of the government and academia. As an important support to motivate technology innovation and promote high-quality economic development, the role of technology finance input should not be ignored. From the perspective of the participants of technology finance input, this paper divides the technology finance input into government technology appropriation, enterprise R&D investment, and financial institution technology loan, and explores the mechanism of each participant’s technology finance input affecting the high-quality economic development. Based on this, the effect and mechanism of the impact of technology finance input on the high-quality economic development of each participant are examined empirically using the provincial panel data from 2004 to 2020 in China. This study finds that the technology finance input of all participants significantly contributes to high-quality economic development, and the promotion effect of enterprise R&D investment is the biggest, followed by government technology appropriation, and the promotion effect of financial institution technology loan is the smallest. There is a significant heterogeneity of innovation talent concentration and finance concentration in the impact of technology finance input on the high-quality economic development of each participant. The promotion effect of technology finance input on high-quality economic development is more significant in both high innovation talent concentration and low finance concentration areas. The mechanism test shows that the government technology appropriation and the financial institution technology loan mainly promote high-quality economic development through substantive innovation, while the enterprise R&D investment mainly promotes high-quality economic development through strategic innovation. These conclusions provide policy insights for China to further strengthen the supporting role of technology finance input and achieve high-quality economic development.
Understanding and applying the "right of technology route decision" is an essential practical issue in China's science and technology system reform and a critical academic proposition in studying science and technology law. We examined the timeline of China's science and technology policies and regulations from 1956 to 2022. The evolution of the scope of the technology route decision right can be initially divided into the exploration stage (1956-1978), the development stage (1978-2012), and the deepening stage (2012-present). This retrospective examination helps to explore further the legal meaning, attributes, positioning, operation mechanism, and institutional design of the right of technology route decision from the science and technology law perspective.
This paper integrates life cycle theory, “taste for science” theory and matching theory to examine the factors influencing Chinese scientist’s engagement in basic research. Based on a national survey of scientists in China conducted in 2019, some facts influencing scientist’s choices at personnel, organizational and disciplinary levels were distinguished. The main findings of the study include: firstly, the types of personal skills suitable for basic research, taste for science, and stay in early stage of academy careers will improve the likelihood of researchers engaging in basic research. Secondly, scientists come from 985 universities, or institutions with evaluation cycle longer than 2 years were more likely to engage in basic research. It is also found that the differences among disciplines are mainly reflected in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine and pharmacy, humanities and social sciences. Finally, a brief discussion is made on how to reform the China's basic research system.
Scientific research integrity is the cornerstone of scientific and technological innovation. Research on the evolution of scientific research integrity and policy system is helpful to understand the core meaning and internal logic of the policy, and has positive significance for improving the level of scientific research integrity and ethical governance.The evolution analysisof policy system includes the analysis of the past development process, existing structure and future evolution trend of the policy system. Existing research focuses on the development process of scientific research integrity and the distribution of policy themes, but there is little research on the policy system architecture and the future trend of policies. In terms of research methods, the existing methods need to be improved in terms of fine-grainedness, semantics, and directness of analysis.Aiming at the gaps in current policy content analysis and shortcomings in methods, this paper introduces the concept of policy minimum particle deconstruction,proposes the minimum particle deconstruction method and three basic structures, and theoretically explains the policy deconstruction with constructivism,and designs the analysis framework of policy system evolution based on the policy minimum particle deconstruction.Taking 55 national research integrity policies since the 1980s as the research object, this paper analyzes the development history, policy priorities, policy frontiers, policy blank areas, policy framework evolution and evolution trend of China's research integrity policies.The research shows that the scientific research integrity policy system evolves in sequence according to the "embryonic stage - basic layout stage - linkage promotion stage - system expansion stage", forming a policy system including five major themes of "division of responsibilities, information records, disciplinary measures, institutional provisions, and ethical governance", and 195 minimum policy particles. The evolution of the scientific research integrity policy system follows the three basic logics of "the policy system is evolving and improving", "the probability of a new policy measure appearing will reappear", and "the repeated phenomenon of the number of policy particles conforms to the Matthew effect of" the stronger ". Further standardizing investigation and handling, moving forward the creditworthiness threshold, strengthening the use of credit information, further eliminating "paper-only", clarifying disciplinary measures, deepening ethical governance, consolidating entity responsibility, accelerating the establishment of market-oriented credit institutions, cultivating credit professionals, managing credit information security, establishing and completing supporting mechanisms for credit repair and other 11 aspects will be the trend direction for future policy evolution.The inspiration from the study is to continue to focus on the policy, and actively focus on the policy frontier and policy gaps. In particular, on the one hand, we should accelerate the promotion of ethical governance in new tracks and new fields such as artificial intelligence and biomedicine, accelerate the formulation of relevant ethical norms, carry out responsible innovation, and grasp the initiative of industrial discourse; On the other hand, we should pay attention to the "last mile" of the implementation of the scientific research integrity policy, and reflect the policy value in the solid implementation of the policy.In the future, the framework model and specific methods can be further optimized, moreover,further empirical research can be carried out in the field of large samples and in-depth research can be carried out in exploring computer intervention.
Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are gradually focusing on seeking strategic knowledge resources via foreign direct investment. Subsidiaries located in different areas are considered the network nodes of MNEs, which can help MNEs access the knowledge in host countries and facilitate the reverse knowledge transfer. Specifically, in the process of foreign direct investment, MNEs are motivated to obtain high-end technological knowledge from host countries through reverse knowledge transfer, and local subsidiaries can facilitate this process by transferring their technological knowledge to parent companies, helping parent companies promote knowledge accumulation and technological progress. With this background, researchers began to explore the antecedents of reverse knowledge transfer. For instance, the extant literature has studied how strategic orientation, organizational structure, absorptive capability, and institutional factors influence reverse knowledge transfer. However, the literature has not investigated the impact of the entry mode of MNEs on reverse knowledge transfer from the perspective of internal integration.
Based on the internal integration perspective, we study the relationship between entry mode and reverse knowledge transfer. We further explore the moderating effects of political closeness between home and host countries and political constraints of the host country on the above relationship. Based on a sample of 2,073 Chinese listed parent companies and their 16,116 foreign subsidiaries from year 2008 to 2020, we find that compared with the acquisition mode, the greenfield mode can gain higher internal integration, and thus facilitate the reverse knowledge transfer from foreign subsidiaries to parent companies. Specifically, the greenfield mode means that a MNE builds a new subsidiary from scratch, whereas the acquisition mode represents that a MNE acquires part or all of an existing subsidiary. Compared with an acquired subsidiary, a newly established subsidiary has similar culture, routines, and organizational structure to the parent company, which helps the subsidiary better integrate with the network of the MNE and thus facilitate reverse knowledge transfer from the subsidiary to the parent company. We further find that the relationship between the entry mode of MNEs and reverse knowledge transfer is positively moderated by political closeness between home and host countries and political constraints of the host country. The high degree of political closeness between countries and the high level of political constraints of the host country represent that host governments would impose few constraints and interventions on local subsidiaries when they transfer their technological knowledge to parent companies. Thus, these two contingent variables could enhance the effectiveness of the reverse knowledge transfer.
This research extends the literature on the entry mode of foreign direct investment and the reverse knowledge transfer in several ways. First, this study contributes to the existing research on the relationship between entry mode and reverse knowledge transfer by offering a new perspective: the internal integration perspective. By studying the difference in the degree of internal integration between two entry modes as well as the diverse outcomes, this study reveals that the internal integration mechanism plays a critical role in the reverse knowledge transfer of MNEs. Second, this study enriches the extant literature by exploring the moderating effects of two important contingent factors: political closeness between home and host countries and political constraints of the host country. This research offers insights for Chinese MNEs who seek technological progress overseas.
With the rise of digital technology, users have gradually transformed from passive recipients of products or services to product providers. According to this background, leading users are most likely to become entrepreneurs due to the characteristics of leading market trends and high expected returns. Furthermore, entrepreneurial activities carried out by leading users are of great significance to release social entrepreneurship and promote the implementation of innovation-driven development strategy. However, in practice, there are still few leading users who successfully convert into entrepreneurs. The reason is that the ideas generated by the leading users have not been effectively converted into entrepreneurial opportunities. Therefore, it is of great theoretical significance and practical value to explore how the ideas of leading users affects their identification of entrepreneurial opportunities.
Based on the reality of user entrepreneurship under digital technology, this paper constructed a relationship model of leading user ideas, user entrepreneurial opportunity identification and participation in online innovation community. Using the sample data of 181 leading users in the Huawei product definition community, the hierarchical regression analysis is used to explore the mechanism of leading users' ideas affecting entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and reveal the moderating effect of the degree of leading users' participation in the community on the leading users' ideas and entrepreneurial opportunity identification. Based on theoretical and empirical research, the results show that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of ideas of leading users and entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and the breadth and depth of community participation strengthen the relationship. The quality of ideas of leading users actively promotes their identification of entrepreneurial opportunities, while the breadth of community participation weakens this relationship.
The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, existing studies tend to focus on the key influencing factors of leading users' creativity, while the results of ideas generation are still insufficient. Based on the active contribution behavior of leading users, this paper reveals the influence of leading users' ideas on entrepreneurial opportunities, and expands the research on the internal mechanism of leading users' entrepreneurship from the perspective of creativity. Secondly, this paper reveals the internal mechanism of the transformation from leading users to entrepreneurs, which makes up for the limitations of existing studies that focus solely on user innovation and user entrepreneurship, and provides a new research perspective for the research on innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Further, this study introduced the strength of social network relationship into the field of user entrepreneurship, providing a new theoretical explanation for the research on the relationship between user innovation and user entrepreneurship, and promoting the development of the theory of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Finally, although previous studies have realized the role of online innovation community in the process of user entrepreneurship, they have not revealed how it plays a specific role in the process of user innovation to user entrepreneurship. This paper defines the role of "regulator" of online innovation community, reveals the situational role of online innovation community in the relationship between user ideas and entrepreneurial opportunity identification, and enriches the research literature on the interaction process of leading users in online innovation community.
Realizing the common prosperity for all people is the essential requirement of Chinese path to modernization, and one of the difficulties lies in narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas. In the practice of building a common prosperity demonstration zone, Huzhou, Zhejiang Province firstly proposed the concept of creating "undifferentiated urban and rural areas", which has attracted widespread attention. As a practical case, its implementation path of empowering rural innovation and entrepreneurship through digitalization to create indiscriminate urban and rural areas is worthy of in-depth study. Introducing innovation and entrepreneurship in the context of digitalization as an intermediary variable, selecting Huzhou's economic and social development statistics and related available data from 2005 to 2020, and empirically studying the impact mechanism of digitalization on creating indiscriminate urban and rural areas. The results show that: digitalization has a significant positive impact on regional innovation and entrepreneurship; regional innovation and entrepreneurship has a significant positive impact on undifferentiated urban and rural areas construction ; only digital innovation without the support of corresponding entrepreneurial activities has no significant impact on undifferentiated urban and rural areas construction, and the "digital divide" has a negative impact on undifferentiated urban and rural areas construction. Based on this, countermeasures such as promoting the "new digital infrastructure" to sink into the countryside, strengthening the main body of digital innovation and entrepreneurship in the rural areas, improving the digital literacy of rural residents, and empowering urban and rural multivariate co-governance with digital intelligence in the new journey of modernization to realize common prosperity for all people.
China is currently undergoing a critical transition from a population quantity dividend to a population quality dividend. Given the significant changes in population structure, it is of great significance to examine the characteristics of regional technological innovation gaps across different regions and periods in order to promote high-quality coordinated development. This paper analyzes data from 31 provinces in China collected between 2000 and 2020 to reveal the spatial and temporal evolution of the country's science and technology innovation gap. The impact of population structure on this gap is also examined through QAP analysis, including the effects of population ageing, human capital, population density, and population urbanization. The study found that:(1) There is a significant spatial imbalance in regional scientific and technological innovation in China, with a decreasing trend from east to west to central to northeast. (2) Urbanization to some extent widens the gap between regional scientific and technological innovation. Human capital and population density have a significant negative impact on the regional science and technology innovation gap. (3) From a spatio-temporal perspective, the negative impact of human capital on the regional technological innovation gap shows an increasing trend of fluctuation. Population urbanization has played a positive role in narrowing the regional innovation gap in science and technology. Finally, the effects of population density and population ageing on the regional science and technology innovation gap show heterogeneity in different periods. Population urbanization, human capital and population aging are the main factors affecting the regional technological innovation gap in the eastern, central and western regions, respectively.
Innovation Consortium is an important factor to build the national innovation system. However, the diversity of stakeholders and the complexity of their interest demands lead to inevitable conflicts of interest in innovation collaboration, thus increasing the difficulty of interest integration and equilibrium, and affects the development of the Innovation Consortium. Therefore, this paper applies conflict theory and game theory to analyze the essence and mechanism of the conflict of interest in the Innovation Consortium, summarizes and brings up three types of conflicts: rule-based interest conflicts, relational interest conflicts, and distributive interest conflicts. Then, using theoretical methods such as multilateral bargaining game theory, normal distribution function, Shapley value method to construct a mathematical model of the interest distribution process of the Innovation Consortium, quantitatively evaluates various conflicts of interest in different parts of the process, and opting for a typical case to testify to the theoretical analysis. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions on how to balance the interests of all parties in the Innovation Consortium, including establishing an effective governance structure conducive to joint governance, promoting the construction of the culture of innovation, which has a core of enhancing mutual trust, as well as strengthening incentive and constraint measures based on dynamic management.
Scientific progress has played an important role in driving successive industrial revolutions and is one of the key drivers of innovation. Innovation is the key to promoting economic growth and enhancing national competitiveness. With the rapid development of the new round of scientific and technological revolution, interdisciplinary integration is constantly evolving, the paradigm of scientific research is undergoing a profound transformation, and international competition is moving forward to the frontier of basic research. Basic research is an important source of breakthrough industrial innovation, but China is lagging in science-driven industrial innovation. Exploring how scientific research can effectively promote technological innovation is an important issue in innovation management and policy. For a long time, Chinese enterprises have relied on efficiency-based innovation through low cost, incremental innovation through technology introduction and imitation, and extensive growth. Although the role of enterprises as the main body of R&D and innovation is constantly being strengthened in constructing China’s national innovation system, the latest data shows that universities and research institutes account for the majority of basic research investment. In the new era of finding new power and innovation paradigm shift, it is becoming a trend for enterprises to carry out science-based innovation. Recently, the science-based innovation model has received more and more attention. However, most of the research is qualitative conceptual analysis and theoretical explanations of science-based innovation. Scholars explored the process of science-driven innovation through case analysis. Only a few scholars studied how the use of scientific knowledge by enterprises affects their performance, and the empirical research and conclusions based on Chinese samples are very limited. Breakthrough innovation provides an important window of opportunity for developing countries and enterprises to catch up, and the current cutting-edge technology problem faced by our country requires the industry to make breakthroughs in core technologies, and the research on how scientific correlation affects the breakthrough innovation of enterprises is still insufficient. There is also a lack of in-depth discussion on how scientific linkages are affected by external factors in the process of influencing enterprise performance, especially the role of the government, as an important player in the national innovation system. As the foundation of the digital economy, the ICT industry plays an important role in promoting economic growth and industrial upgrading. The ICT industry is also considered to be highly related to scientific knowledge, but the existing research is mostly focused on biotechnology, nanotechnology and other fields. It is of great practical significance to explore the impact of scientific knowledge correlation on enterprise performance in the ICT industry. Based on the 656 listed ICT companies in China from 2010 to 2019, this paper explores the impact of science linkage on financial performance and breakthrough innovation performance, analyzing the moderating effect of government subsidies for innovation, as well as conducting heterogeneity tests of the size and nature of enterprises. The results show that science linkage has a significant positive impact on financial performance. There is an inverted U-shaped relationship between science linkage and breakthrough innovation performance. Government subsidies for innovation have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between science linkage and financial performance, and the relationship between science linkage and breakthrough innovation performance. At the same time, the impact of science linkage on breakthrough innovation performance is more significant in non-state-owned enterprises and large enterprises. This study provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of science-based innovation models for enterprises. It also has potential guidance for the interaction between government, industry, university and research institutes and the government’s innovation policy formulation.
