International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management

This paper applies the multiple-perspective decision-making approach [Linstone (1984, 1999); Linstone and Zhu (2000)] and the concepts of discounting and technological forecasting and planning as a framework to study the influence of culture on technology development and management in Korea. Korea was an early innovator of both metallic movable type printing and MP3 players and they had the first-mover advantage of developing both technologies earlier than other technologically advanced countries in the same era. However, these two innovations were not commercially successful in Korea. Many reasons could have attributed to the failure. By analyzing these two cases and an additional case on Korea's plan to build an Internet-centric economy, we conclude that the imbalance among the technical, organizational, and personal (TOP) perspectives was the major factor. Business executives and policy makers need to deal with not only issues related to discounting and forecasting when planning for commercialization and diffusion of new technologies, but also the organizational and cultural factors which play an important role that bridges inventions and the successful diffusion of innovations. In sum, the balance of multiple perspectives of decision-making, the applications of the principles of discounting and technology forecasting and planning, and the roles of diversity and government policy are all crucial for the success of an innovation in a global context.

Expropriability is the ability of (potential) competitors to extract information about innovation and utilize it to their advantage in a manner that decreases the competitive advantages of the original innovator. It has an effect on the profit margins and, subsequently, on the strategic behavior of a firm in terms of innovation activities. In this study, the relationship of appropriability and expropriability is clarified, and empirical evidence from 299 companies is provided to increase understanding of the strategic protection of intellectual assets. The results indicate that industries differ in terms of expropriability and that innovation performance depends on the level of expropriability.

This study used qualitative methods to collect interview data from six technology companies and applied content analysis to interpret the data. The purpose was to describe the decision-making model in the outsourcing of public relations (PR) by technology corporations to PR agencies. Results indicated that during the process of outsourcing PR, complicated relationships existed among various concepts, and the relationships were more complex than linear relationships. Within the organization, the developmental stage of its PR, the target characteristics of its PR, accumulation of individual and organizational PR abilities, and its characteristics of performance evaluation all significantly influenced the planning, execution, assessment, and development of PR abilities. Factors external to the organization, such as different environmental demands and the characteristics of PR agencies, affected the viewpoints, selection criteria, and decision-making processes of organizations with regard to outsourcing PR. The individual abilities of organizational staff, accumulation of PR ability, and outsourcing characteristics were all important concepts that determined whether technology companies outsourced their PR management. Due to diversified environmental demands, conflicts may arise from the various demands placed on the organization.

Citation patterns are important to understanding the spread of technological ideas as science is essentially a cumulative activity. One feature only now being appreciated is the obsolescence or ageing patterns in citations and the insights their study can bring. There have been a number of studies examining, predicting, modeling and plotting citation delays, ageing and the publication cycle. These normally apply lognormal, log-logistic and Weibull distributions to scientific papers. This paper adds to this body of work by examining a set of 18 other distributions, and tests their predictive power on a new data set based on 10 years of ISI Citation data for 10 innovation centered journals. The resulting grouping of journals appears to be a useful proxy for academic-practitioner involvement and warrants further investigation. The finding that the three-parameter Inverse Gaussian provides the best fit to the data extends the understanding of this process. As well as allowing the classification of literature, this improved representation of citation obsolescence will allow us to predict earlier and more precisely those scientific ideas which are generating noteworthy attention or may be suitable for early exploitation.

Successfully managing project team composition, development, and learning are critical competencies for high-performing, innovative technology firms. This paper presents a conceptual model and two cases of cross-functional project teams working inside innovative, technology-based companies. The cases highlight the ways in which organizational structure, project team composition, team task and technology, project leadership, and context shaped the way each project team approached their task, shared knowledge and solutions, and completed their work. One team, a business process and system improvement team, was charged with designing and deploying a new system, while the second team crossed international, occupational, and functional boundaries to develop an international marketing strategy for a cross-national technology partnership. Following the cases, the paper suggests some implications for technology and innovation managers and team leaders, and proposes some questions and direction for future research.

Following the increasing globalization of value chains, offshoring is gaining importance for firms' competitiveness. Strategy, management, and organizational scholars have analyzed this phenomenon from different theoretical lenses and with a variety of methodological approaches. However, literature lacks a framework within which to analyze firms' offshoring strategies and processes. This paper proposes an interpretative framework to understand extant literature as well as to identify possible gaps to be fulfilled with future research. The identified categories of the proposed interpretative framework are: antecedents, processes, and outcomes. We use case-based evidence to populate the framework and to highlight implications for innovation management.

For economic and environmental policies aimed at developing sustainable economies, it is important to have a general modeling approach which can quantitatively connect economic processes with biological and physical processes of the environment. If economic processes cannot be measured as to their real physical/biological impacts, one does not know whether or not such economic processes are sustainable in nature. To create an integrated economic/environmental model, we have mathematically generalized the Leontief's input–output economic model — from vector notation to tensor notation. The use of tensor mathematics for input–output models of both an economy and its environment provides a data architecture to create simulation models of the environmental impact of an economy.