Regional Open Innovation: Stage And Strategy

Regional open innovation has been an universal phenomenon in the world. As economic globalization and regional integration accelerating, any region could not get a rapid development in a closed environment. Innovation-driven development becomes a consensus of the international community. However, not only the location,scale, nature resources, political institution, marketization degree, but also the education level and technology distance are different between regions. The heterogeneity of regions determines the diversity of the innovation pattern and stage of region. Each enterprise in the region faces to decide where to carry out innovation.These actions which are for the complementary innovation assets accelerate the speed of innovation in the region. Either the great international city like New York or the nameless cities are in the role of open innovation. The Guangdong province and Jiangsu province gradually improved their competitive position by open innovation.The open innovation is more complicated in a big country with many regions which are unbalanced development. China encouraged some regions developing first,which made the technology in some region better than others. So there are so many problem should be make clear to understand the China open innovation. Should the developing region take the same open innovation strategy as the developed region?Are there competitive relationship between the regions? Do these relationship affect the stage and the strategy of open innovation?Chesbrough(2003) shows that open innovation is a demand for regions instead of a choice. In this thesis region open innovation is considered as systematically knowledge exploration, knowledge retention, knowledge exploitation and institution evolution with inboard and outboard creative resources in the innovation process. It could be better understand in three levels.At the micro level, enterprises make use of the creative resources in different regions, which will push forward the regional integration and improve the allocationefficiency. Enterprises integrate and exploit the inboard and outboard knowledge, then create value and capture value, through sensing, identifying, learning, understanding and absorbing the outboard knowledge, which enhance the dynamic capability of the regions. And then the region will be more open to utilize more resources in a larger scale regions and integrate into the world economy.At the meso-level, open innovation could be fall into three stages. In the first stage, importing foreign technology is the main way to get the science knowledge and management knowledge in a low cost. Other ways account for a small percentage. In the second stage, co-create value and co-specialization are the main way to make use of inboard and outboard resources based on the capabilities of searching, identifying,learning and absorptive. The proportion of importing foreign technology decreasing gradually. In the third stage, using inboard creative resources is the main way to create value and capture value. There are three kinds of regional innovation competition,which affects the three stages above. One of them is the competition between internal R&D investment, that internal R&D investment in one region will increase that in another region. The second one of them is competition between collaborate innovation in regions, they compete to capture the complementary creative resources out of regions. The third one of them is cross competition between them. Regional innovation competition, as an “invisible hand”, guides each region to improve competitiveness, at the same time improving innovation capability for all regions, and then accelerate the stage of regional open innovation moving forward.At the macro-level, the strategy of regional open innovation could be split into catch-up-oriented strategy and innovation-oriented strategy. The catch-up-oriented strategy means to establish appropriate technology and institute environment, to increase the internal R&D investment, to improve the absorptive capability, without paying attention to obtain the information of outboard creative resources. At the institution level, the powerful government pushes the process of learning advanced technology and knowledge from abroad, which is top-down effect. The innovation-oriented strategy means to improve the dynamic capability of knowledge exploration, knowledge retention, knowledge exploitation to capture value frommarkets, which will generate the demand of outboard creative resources, and then the information of outboard resources and ways to co-cooperation should be considered.At the institution level, the top-down effect challenged by the allocation disperstiveness of creative resources and the complexity of innovation, market become the basic way to allocate resources, the cross-border enterprises do innovation active and break through the traditional institution, which feedback to the government of region who adjust the informal institution to formal institution. That is the bottom-up effect to accelerate the regional open innovation with the innovation-oriented strategy.Basing on provincial panel data during 2001-2012 in China, this thesis research on the stages of regional open innovation and regional innovation competition. The estimate results shows that all the regions use the inboard and outboard resources to innovate, that the co-create investment is the main way to innovate, and that there are obviously innovation competition between regions. The competition relationship between region internal R&D investment is complementary and the competition relationship between region co-cooperation innovation is substitution. Importing foreign technology can not improve the performance of innovation in all regions,which means all the regions going into the open innovation-oriented stage. The cross-border enterprises(cross regions enterprises or mutinational enterprises) and bottom-up effect should be pay more attention in regional open innovation.As the manager of knowledge management and institution, all regions should take the open innovation-oriented strategy, take steps to develop the dynamic capability of open innovation using the inboard and outboard creative resources, to get rid of the traditional “path dependent”, so as to promote the innovative development of all regions.