Yutao Sun’s research while affiliated with Dalian University of Technology and other places

Being the major players in promoting innovation, enterprises are therefore central to innovation–based development. Establishing how vibrant they are in terms of innovation has become a heavily debated issue in both academic and industry circles. Through a sample involving Chinese listed companies in advanced material manufacturing, this study utilizes exploratory factor analysis to develop an evaluation system of enterprises’ innovation vitality on the basis of three dimensions: innovation persistence, volatility, and growth. The study establishes deeper interaction between innovation vitality and two major indicators-persistence and volatility formats input and cooperation, while also promoting the growth of innovative input and output. This study adds insights related to the objective assessment of enterprises’ innovation vitality and the promotion of subsequent innovation efforts.

This study explores the impact of a focal firm’s (located in emerging economies) international R&D cooperation with partners in both emerging economies (EE) and developed economies (ED) on its exploitative and exploratory innovation in a bifurcated world. By distinguishing between EE and ED R&D cooperation, we propose a theoretical framework that explains the relationships between EE/ED R&D cooperation and firms’ exploitative/exploratory innovation based on knowledge recombination view. Using a sample of China’s pharmaceutical firms from 2010 to 2022, our findings indicate that firms’ structural shifting from ED to EE R&D cooperation reshapes the structure of innovation in the context of bifurcation. EE R&D cooperation has a greater positive impact on the focal firms’ exploitative innovation compared to exploratory innovation, whereas ED R&D cooperation is more conducive to exploratory than exploitative innovation. Meanwhile, bifurcation positively affects the proportion of EE on the international (EE+ED) R&D cooperation, and the share of firms’ exploitative innovation increases. Moreover, when inter-country political relations are amicable, EE and ED R&D cooperation generates more benefits for the focal firms’ exploitative and exploratory innovation.

Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), an industrial policy, aims to position China among the global leading manufacturing powers. Different from other industrial policies in China, MIC 2025 is implemented by policy experimentation of pilot cities, which gives priority to the local governments. However, whether MIC 2025 pilot cities promote firm innovation is unclear in current literature. Using MIC 2025 pilot cities as a quasi-natural experiment, this study analyzes the effect and the mechanism of MIC 2025 on firm innovation. The sample consists of 4422 firm-year observations of Chinese listed manufacturing firms in 2012–2022. The result indicates that focal firm located in MIC 2025 pilot cities facilitates its innovation. Mechanism analysis show that MIC 2025 promotes firm innovation through tax incentives, public subsidies, convenient financing, academic collaboration and talent incentives. This study extends industrial policy literature with regard to how place-based policy experimentation promote the implementation of China’s industrial policies. Local governments’ participations and their interaction with the central government are vital for a successful policy experimentation.

Previous reviews of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) have not provided an integrative and evolutionary analysis, and the academic literature generally reflects a fragmented research perspective. Therefore, this study combined a bibliometric analysis and text-mining to analyze the evolution of theories and topics as well as theory-topic co-occurrence. We also used a topic modelling technique to divide the articles into 10 subareas and further analyzed their subthemes and dynamics. Overall, we examined 1,197 articles published from 1989 to 2022. This study contributes to the current literature by providing data on theory-topic co-occurrence and its evolution in cross-border M&As, conducting theory-topic co-occurrence analysis that identifies popular research trends and provides new insights into how to integrate M&As practices with theories, identifying 10 sub-areas via bibliometric analysis and BERTopic modelling, and identifying key theories and emerging themes to be examined in future studies.

Star inventors are the most outstanding innovators in the technology field. Most extant literature defines star inventors along the lines of performance and social relationship. This paper presents a three-dimensional model of star inventors—invention performance, social relationship and technology commercialization as an extension of previous multidimensional conceptualizations of individual differences in inventive capacity. Furthermore, a rank–frequency distribution model combined with the Peak Over Threshold (POT) model based on Extreme Value Theory (EVT) is utilized to determine the threshold for distinguishing stars from non-stars. One case study describes inventors in the graphene sector based on the USPTO database. The findings suggest that 491 star inventors can be identified out of 5777 inventors in the graphene sector; the highest overlap between any two types of star inventors is up to 21%. If the commercialization of inventors is not considered, nearly half of the commercial stars will be ignored. All-stars are the most outstanding in terms of invention performance, social relationship and technology commercialization, but they are also the scarcest.

Microreactors have gained widespread attention from academia and industrial researchers due to their exceptionally fast mass and heat transfer and flexible control. In this work, CiteSpace software was used to systematically analyze the relevant literature to gain a comprehensively understand on the research status of microreactors in various fields. The results show that the research depth and application scope of microreactors are continuing to expand. The top 10 most popular research fields are photochemistry, pharmaceutical intermediates, multistep flow synthesis, mass transfer, computational fluid dynamics, μ‐TAS (micro total analysis system), nanoparticles, biocatalysis, hydrogen production, and solid‐supported reagents. The evolution trends of current focus areas are examined, including photochemistry, mass transfer, biocatalysis and hydrogen production and their milestone literature is analyzed in detail. This article demonstrates the development of different fields of microreactors technology and highlights the unending opportunities and challenges offered by this fascinating technology.