Wenying Fu

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Northumbria University

Embedding the theoretical discussion on the framework of evolutionary regional innovation systems (RIS), this book reveals the informal nature of the emerging RIS in China, within which interactive learning is organized on the basis of social networks. Furthermore, in a comparative study in the Pearl River Delta, China demonstrates that dirigiste g...

In this paper we investigate how the innovation behavior of firms to capitalize on so-cial proximity with independent firms and organizational proximity with parent companies and foreign customers contributes to innovation in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), China. While tradi-tional views often hold that Chinese firms rely heavily on organizational pr...

Learning by interacting defines the endogenous path of economic development in modern innovation studies. In this paper, we aim to investigate the way that firms undertake interactive learning in the Chinese context by introducing the role of informal Guanxi network. In this way, this paper tries to bridge the gap between studies on firm innovation...

Abstract This paper, which is positioned in the interface of innovation economics and economic geography, contributes to the debate about the path‐dependent evolution of regional innovation systems (RIS) in emerging and transitional economies. Drawing on an empirical study conducted in Shenzhen and Dongguan, China, a path‐dependent nature of govern...

This paper aims to analyze the impact of knowledge spillovers through international channels, namely foreign direct investment and trade, on technological upgrading in Guangdong province, China. We utilize panel data on Guangdong's 21 municipalities for the period 2000–2008. The results prove that external knowledge spillovers effectively trigger l...

The concept of an ‘entrepreneurial ecosystem’ has become a major means for both theorizing and making policy decisions concerning entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development. The notion of an entrepreneurial ecosystem captures the way in which entrepreneurship is increasingly performed and undertaken via the innate interdependencies exis...

Introduction Innovation and entrepreneurship are the cornerstone of the modern economy, driving the creation of new economic opportunities. As a research area, it has gained traction among economic geographers as a spatially bounded phenomenon and regional event (see Chapters 9 and 16 in this volume). Processes of regional growth have shifted the a...

China’s specific developmental context defines the need to understand its state logic of knowledge transfer, particularly from the agency perspective of universities. This paper proposes the new term ‘university engagement with industry’ (UEI) to highlight the active role of universities in university–industry linkages. A structural method is adopt...

To offer a fresh angle on the state capacity to advance decarbonization, this article brings into dialog political economies of scale and the Mannian notion of state infrastructural power, animating this conceptual cross-fertilization with an analysis of China's evolving policy framework for decarbonization. This article begins with building the co...

In this exchange piece, I engage with Weber’s critical analysis, destabilizing the ideological dichotomy of the big bang approach versus experimental gradualism. I suggest that China’s past decades of conspicuous economic success are attributed to the political tactics of navigating the variegated sociospatial contingencies, as well as the conjunct...

This article studies how three sets of regional factors—knowledge, agglomeration, and openness—impact and interact differently with startups and incumbent firms in their innovative capacity building. Based on a large dataset of Chinese high‐tech firms, regression analysis shows that the speed of growing startup innovative capacity relies positively...

Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are active...

Literature on regional entrepreneurship has tended to neglect inter-regional flows of human capital, and yet spatial mobility provide the nascent entrepreneurs with multi-location knowledge and networks to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. The paper fills the gap by adopting an agent-environment interactionist perspective in the investigation...

Taking the entrepreneurial activities as a local phenomenon, this paper aims to investigate the way that individual’s active embeddedness in cluster environment influences on the entrepreneurial intentions and locational preference of the nascent entrepreneurs. Drawing on the employee survey data in the Tianhe Software Park in Guangzhou, China, the...

The underlying spatial forces of firm networking practices are understudied in the literature of economic geography. This paper aims to reveal patterns and mechanisms of networking practices and relates them to China's transitional context based on empirical data from a firm survey in the Pearl River Delta. It addresses the localisation effect as t...

Spatial processes are highly relevant phenomena in innovation studies. Regional innovation is both influenced by heterogeneous regional attributes and the neighbouring innovation factors. Spatial econometrics are developed to explicitly cope with the issues of spatial dependence. This paper aims to reveal the spatial processes of regional innovatio...

This chapter analyses an original firm-level dataset collected by our own Hong Kong (HK) Company Survey 2007 to investigate agility patterns applied by HK companies in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in organising relations to their producers in the PRD and their customers. It also investigates the role of informality proxied by personal relationships...

Vertical integration into the organizational hierarchy of global production system is a key element of knowledge transfer for latecomer countries, while the issue of spatial mechanism of knowledge creation and innovation is less touched in the literature against the context of latecomers due to the underdevelopment of firm capacity and related inst...

Governance constitutes elementary supportive infrastructure for regional innovation systems. This paper extends the evolutionary lens of governance into initial industrialization phase and examines the impact of their evolution into regional innovation systems on fostering innovation activities. Drawing on the empirical substances in Shenzhen and D...