Yimei Hu

• Ph.D in Business Economics
• Professor (Associate) at Aalborg University

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize and make sense of the internationalization of the triple helix (TH) model. Design/methodology/approach – As this study is exploitative in nature, an inductive approach is adopted in data collection and data analysis. The Danish TH's experiences in China are used as empirical evidences. Primar...

Using a unique dataset, we investigate the “resilient” companies with reported addition in their business scope the development, manufacturing, and sales of masks, medical devices, thermometer, disinfectant, and medical protective clothing during the COVID-19. We find that companies that proactively responded to the crisis by adding anti-epidemic r...

Public R&D subsidy is a commonly adopted policy instrument to promote firms’ exploratory innovation that encourages novel knowledge learning. Under the multi-level institutional settings such as China, however, it is unclear in current literature as to whether central and local-level governmental R&D subsidy programs exert heterogeneous influences...

This research investigates how complex product systems (CoPs)-based innovation ecosystem is created in terms of structure and interactions among players, as well as how technology, value and capability evolve at different stages of an innovation ecosystem. Based on an exploratory case study on the innovation ecosystem of a nuclear power giant-China...

Establishing Strategic Technological Partnerships (STPs) with foreign partners is an increasingly studied topic within the innovation management literature. Partnering firms can jointly create sources of relational competitive advantage. Chinese firms often lack Research and Development (R&D) capabilities but are increasingly becoming preferred tec...

The current decoupling and bifurcated situation arising from external shocks, represented by the US-China trade war, has triggered unprecedented challenges for firms in strategically sensitive industries, such as the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry. Chinese firms in the ICT industry are at the forefront, and they are compell...

The study examines the effect of public research and development (R&D) subsidies on the knowledge creation of high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through universities. It also tests two mediating pathways: R&D collaboration with universities and the recruitment of highly educated human resources. We use exclusive panel data from a s...

As downstream actors providing innovations that enhance the value of the core proposition, complementors have been recognized as indispensable in many definitions of ecosystems. The increasing attention they have received in the past years demonstrates the concern to enrich our knowledge of complementors. With a hybrid approach of bibliometric and...

Purpose This study aims to test the effects of Technology-related Divestitures (TRDs) on firms' exploratory innovation. The moderating effects of firms' internal and external resource coordination activities, resource buffering and bridging, are also explored. Design/methodology/approach A set of data including 1,372 Chinese listed firms from 2009...

Purpose Studies have documented the distinctive advantage of innovation ecosystems in integrating and recombining heterogeneous knowledge resources across firms' boundaries. However, hierarchical governance in the form of vertical integration is still preferred in many industries for organizing innovation, and the current literature touches little...

We use Chinese A-share listed firms from the manufacturing industry during 2016–2019 to examine the impact of social trust and blockchain application on firms’ collaborative innovation. The results reveal that social trust among acquaintances and social trust among strangers have heterogeneous impacts on corporate collaborative innovation: Trust in...

R&D subsidized loans (tiexi daikuan) is an effective market-driven solution to promote firms’ R&D outputs, including patent applications and new product sales, in China. However, empirical examination on the effects of subsidized loans is insufficient. Using a panel data of manufacturing firms of Jiangsu Province from 2010 to 2014, the study invest...

Firms in a nascent industry need to search across various technological trajectories and market opportunities with limited prior knowledge. While inter-firm learning (e.g., imitation) helps the focal firm adapt in the process of conformity, intra-firm learning (e.g., independent experimentation) helps a firm stand out from rivals in the process of...

China has been promoting garbage classification in its rural areas, yet it lacks financial appropriation and fiscal decentralization to support waste processing projects. Though the existing literature has suggested fiscal decentralization strategies between different local government levels, few of the studies ascertain garbage classification effi...

Propensity score analysis becomes complicated when there are multiple treatments. Existing studies bypass this complication by focusing on two of the treatments at a time and calculate the pairwise treatment effects, but this pairwise comparison does not allow advanced analysis that investigates how different treatments interact with other variable...

In this paper, we evaluate the consequences of the U.S.-China trade decoupling from the global value chain perspective.

This original book is a unique and original in-depth study on how, in the past decade, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have achieved technological innovation in the large infrastructure sectors. It reveals a ‘new world’ of Chinese innovation, showing that SOEs are willing to innovate and are also more than capable of doing so. Based on find...

More and more companies are developing customer service by building Smart Community Service Brand Platforms (SCSBP). However, the impact of digital platform functions on sustainable brand relationships, and the mediating mechanism of customer’s emotional cognition are still unclear. The functional value of digital services in the property service i...

Constructing a network organization for global R&D is presented as a common sense practice in existing literature. However, there are still queries about the network organization, such as the persistence of hierarchies which make a network organization merely a “bureaucracy-lite” organization. Furthermore, in practice, we rarely see radical organiz...

When involved in an uncertain and competitive business environment, firms are faced with two contradictory pressures: differentiate from competitors for competitive advantages vs. conform to industrial norms to gain legitimacy. Building on and extending James G. March’s work on exploitation/exploration and organizational learning, this study enrich...

Strategic alliances are coopetitive in nature as they incorporate both cooperation and competition: partners cooperate to use their complementary resources for joint value creation while simultaneously compete to appropriate the created value. We study this tension between value creation and value appropriation both theoretically and experimentally...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the interactive conflicts between business and governmental authorities in the regulatory process of an emerging business model: sharing economy. Focusing on bike sharing system, the study also investigates the conflict-handling strategy of bike sharing companies and government regulation. Desig...

This study attempts to answer the research question about how does a hub firm orchestrate innovation ecosystem of complex product development through dynamic capabilities, and how to make sense of such ecosystem-based dynamic capabilities. Using an exploratory single case study, this research analyzes the electricity power industry in China, which...

The fierce competitive status of the business world has urged innovation activities to transform from mechanistic to ecological and organic. An innovation ecosystem consists of multilateral organizations and emerges as a favorable mechanism for value co-creation and sustainable growth. Yet the theorizing of an innovation ecosystem is still at an ea...

This paper combines the perspective of co-evolution with studies in the area of business model, reveals the phenomenon of business model co-evolution and explores the business model coevolution mechanism between firms through a case study. Findings and what other companies can learn from this study are as follows. Firstly, companies, be it leaders...

Purpose This study aims to explore key factors and specific ways for the upgrade to hybrid incubators in the context of China. A hybrid incubator means that a technology-based business incubators (TBIs) can implement various distinct value creation processes with the integration of the advantages of non-for-profit and for-profit TBIs at same time...

During the past three decades, there has been a substantial amount of research discussing an organizational innovation: designing a network organization to facilitate innovation. However, researchers have different perspectives and have drawn different conclusions, some of which conflict with each other. The aim of this paper is to review the liter...

Open innovation in multifi rm networks has been a popular topic for long, and the focal fi rm with orchestration capability will enhance its innovation performance through networks. However, only recently, researchers started to study SME's open innovation and networks, especially those from the low-tech industry. Besides multifi rm networks, some...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and highlight the particular innovation characteristics and modes of the Chinese online game industry from a networking perspective. Design/methodology/approach – This research is qualitative. Both primary and secondary data are used, which is collected through desk research on related documents an...