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Using a combination of theoretical discussion and real-world case studies, this book focuses on current and future use of RAISA technologies in the tourism economy, including examples from the hotel, restaurant, travel agency, museum, and events industries.

This paper studies two fundamentally distinct approaches to opening a technology platform and their different impacts on innovation. One approach is to grant access to a platform and thereby open up markets for complementary components around the platform. Another approach is to give up control over the platform itself. Using data on 21 handheld computing systems (1990-2004), I find that granting greater levels of access to independent hardware developer firms produces up to a fivefold acceleration in the rate of new handheld device development, depending on the precise degree of access and how this policy was implemented. Where operating system platform owners went further to give up control (beyond just granting access to their platforms) the incremental effect on new device development was still positive but an order of magnitude smaller. The evidence from the industry and theoretical arguments both suggest that distinct economic mechanisms were set in motion by these two approaches to opening.

In a first survey of its type, we measure development and modification of consumer products by product users in a representative sample of 1,173 UK consumers age 18 and older. We estimate this previously unmeasured type of household sector innovation to be quite large: 6.1% of UK consumers-nearly 2.9 million individuals-have engaged in consumer product innovation during the prior three years. In aggregate, consumers' annual product development expenditures are more than 1.4 times larger than the annual consumer product R&D expenditures of all firms in the United Kingdom combined. Consumers engage in many small projects that seem complementary to the innovation efforts of incumbent producers. Consumer innovators very seldom protect their innovations via intellectual property, and 17% diffuse to others. These results imply that, at the country level, productivity studies yield inflated effect sizes for producer innovation in consumer goods. They also imply that existing companies should reconfigure their product development systems to find and build on prototypes developed by consumers. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.

This study explores the nexus between digital and green transformations—the so-called “twin” transition—in European regions in an effort to identify the impact of digital and environmental technologies on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions originating from industrial production. We conduct an empirical analysis based on an original dataset that combines information on environmental and digital patent applications with information on GHG emissions from highly polluting plants for the period 2007–2016 at the metropolitan region level in the European Union and the UK. Results show that the local development of environmental technologies reduces GHG emissions, while the local development of digital technologies increases them, albeit in the latter case different technologies seem to have different impacts on the environment, with big data and computing infrastructures being the most detrimental. We also find differential impacts across regions depending on local endowment levels of the respective technologies: the beneficial effect of environmental technologies is stronger in regions with large digital technology endowments and, conversely, the detrimental effect of digital technologies is weaker in regions with large green technology endowments. Policy actions promoting the “twin” transition should take this evidence into account, in light of the potential downside of the digital transformation when not combined with the green transformation.

While exploration and exploitation represent two fundamentally different approaches to organizational learning, recent literature has increasingly indicated the need for firms to achieve a balance between the two. This balanced view is embedded in the concept of ambidextrous organizations. However, there is little direct evidence of the positive effect of ambidexterity on firm performance. This paper seeks to test the ambidexterity hypothesis by examining how exploration and exploitation can jointly influence firm performance in the context of firms' approach to technological innovation. Based on a sample of 206 manufacturing firms, we find evidence consistent with the ambidexterity hypothesis by showing that (1) the interaction between explorative and exploitative innovation strategies is positively related to sales growth rate, and (2) the relative imbalance between explorative and exploitative innovation strategies is negatively related to sales growth rate.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is an important driving force for economic growth and technological innovation, but it also brings environmental pollution problems along with economic development. From the perspective of technological innovation, the impact of FDI on China’s environmental pollution deserves further study. With the spatial econometric tools employed to account for the potential spatial dependence of environmental pollution, this study uses the panel data of 30 province-level units in China from 1998 to 2016 to investigate the impact of FDI and technological innovation on environmental pollution. The results show that increased FDI can reduce environmental pollution, confirming the existence of the “pollution halo hypothesis”; technological innovation can reduce the emissions of sulfur dioxide and smoke dust but increase the chemical oxygen demand. Therefore, vigorous introduction of foreign capital is good for sustainable development for government, but it is also necessary to pay attention to screening and identifying environment-friendly enterprises with advanced production technology and management experience and to reject high-pollution and high-energy-consuming enterprises eliminated by developed countries.

Looking for ways to handle the transition to a digital economy Robots, artificial intelligence, and driverless cars are no longer things of the distant future. They are with us today and will become increasingly common in coming years, along with virtual reality and digital personal assistants. As these tools advance deeper into everyday use, they raise the question-how will they transform society, the economy, and politics? If companies need fewer workers due to automation and robotics, what happens to those who once held those jobs and don't have the skills for new jobs? And since many social benefits are delivered through jobs, how are people outside the workforce for a lengthy period of time going to earn a living and get health care and social benefits? Looking past today's headlines, political scientist and cultural observer Darrell M. West argues that society needs to rethink the concept of jobs, reconfigure the social contract, move toward a system of lifetime learning, and develop a new kind of politics that can deal with economic dislocations. With the U.S. governance system in shambles because of political polarization and hyper-partisanship, dealing creatively with the transition to a fully digital economy will vex political leaders and complicate the adoption of remedies that could ease the transition pain. It is imperative that we make major adjustments in how we think about work and the social contract in order to prevent society from spiraling out of control. This book presents a number of proposals to help people deal with the transition from an industrial to a digital economy. We must broaden the concept of employment to include volunteering and parenting and pay greater attention to the opportunities for leisure time. New forms of identity will be possible when the \"job\" no longer defines people's sense of personal meaning, and they engage in a broader range of activities. Workers will need help throughout their lifetimes to acquire new skills and develop new job capabilities. Political reforms will be necessary to reduce polarization and restore civility so there can be open and healthy debate about where responsibility lies for economic well-being. This book is an important contribution to a discussion about tomorrow-one that needs to take place today.

We gather detailed data on organizational practices and information technology (IT) use at 253 firms to examine the hypothesis that external focus-the ability of a firm to detect and therefore respond to changes in its external operating environment-increases returns to IT, especially when combined with decentralized decision making. First, using survey-based measures, we find that external focus is correlated with both organizational decentralization, and IT investment. Second, we find that a cluster of practices including external focus, decentralization, and IT is associated with improved product innovation capabilities. Third, we develop and test a three-way complementarities model that indicates that the combination of external focus, decentralization, and IT is associated with significantly higher productivity in our sample. We also introduce a new set of instrumental variables representing barriers to IT-related organizational change and find that our results are robust when we account for the potential endogeneity of organizational investments. Our results may help explain why firms that operate in information-rich environments such as high-technology clusters or areas with high worker mobility have experienced especially high returns to IT investment and suggest a set of practices that some managers may be able to use to increase their returns from IT investments. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

This paper analyzed the current situation and development trends of energy consumption and carbon emissions, and the current situation and development trend of coal consumption in China. In the context of recently established carbon peak and carbon neutralization targets, this paper put forward the main problems associated with the green and low-carbon development and utilization of coal. Five key technological innovation directions in mining were proposed, including green coal development, intelligent and efficient mining, low-carbon utilization and conversion of coal, energy conservation and emission reduction, carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). Focusing on the above technological innovation directions, it is suggested to carry out three basic theories, including the theory of green efficient intelligent mining, clean and low-carbon utilization and transformation of coal, and CCUS. Meanwhile, it is proposed to develop 12 key technologies, including green coal mining and ecological environment protection, efficient coal mining and intelligent mine construction, key technologies and equipment for efficient coal processing, underground coal gasification and mining, ultra-high parameter and ultra-supercritical power generation technology, intelligent and flexible coal-fired power generation technology, new power cycle coal-fired power generation technology, the development of coal-based special fuels, coal-based bulk and specialty chemicals, energy conservation and consumption reduction, large-scale and low-cost carbon capture, CO 2 utilization and storage. Finally, necessary measures from the governmental perspective were also proposed.

How did the diffusion of the Internet influence research collaborations within firms? We examine the relationship between business use of basic Internet technology and the size and geographic composition of industrial research teams between 1992 and 1998. We find robust empirical evidence that basic Internet adoption is associated with an increased likelihood of collaborative patents from geographically dispersed teams. On the contrary, we find no evidence of such a link between Internet adoption and within-location collaborative patents, nor do we find any evidence of a relationship between basic Internet and single-inventor patents. We interpret these results as evidence that adoption of basic Internet significantly reduced the coordination costs of research teams, but find little evidence that a drop in the costs of shared resource access significantly improved research productivity. This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.