Journal of World Business
Call for papers for a special issue
Submission Deadline: 31.5.2018
The Nature of Innovation in Global Value Chains
Guest Editors:
Ari Van Assche, Kristin Brandl, Alessandra Perri, Vittoria G. Scalera, Björn
Ambos
The rise of global value chains (GVCs) has revolutionized the way that production processes are carried out in the world economy. Thanks
to reduced communication and transportation costs, many companies have abandoned the practice of producing goods or services entirely in a single country and within their own organizational boundaries. Thus, through offshoring and outsourcing, value chains
are sliced up and activities are dispersed to locations and actors where they can be produced most efficiently.
Scholars have been quick to jump on this trend. Over the last two decades, an influential literature has emerged, analyzing the
geographical spread of global value chains (Suder et al., 2015; Turkina, van Assche, and Kali, 2016), the factors that affect the decision where to locate activities (Doh, Bunyaratavej,
and Hahn, 2009; Jensen and Pedersen, 2011; Ma and Van Assche, 2016), or how to govern GVCs (Gereffi, Humphrey, and Sturgeon, 2005). Other, more firm related studies investigated the
drivers of the international fragmentation of production (Kedia and Mukherjee,
2009; Schmeisser, 2013), the firm types more likely to follow this trend (Farinas and Martin-Marcos, 2010), and the effects it has on a firm for example with regards to its productivity or employment (e.g. Brandl, Mol, and Petersen, 2017; Bunyaratavej,
Hahn, and Doh, 2007; Hummels et al. 2014; Kasahara and Rodrigue, 2008; Larsen, Manning, and Pedersen., 2013).
Remarkably absent in this literature, however, is a profound discussion of the impact of GVCs on firm innovation (Pietrobelli and Rabellotti, 2011; Van
Assche, 2016). This lack of insight is interesting especially when considering the importance of innovation in the contemporary international business environment. For example, the fine slicing of value chains also implies that R&D activities can be geographically
separated from manufacturing activities. However, while Farrell (2005) and Vivek, Richey, and Dalela (2009) suggest that this dispersion can benefit innovation, as it allows firms to free up resources that could be invested in R&D activities, others such as
Pisano and Shih (2009), warn that spatial separation of manufacturing and R&D activities may in some cases undermine a company’s innovation capabilities. Furthermore, such dispersion increases the complexity of the firm’s operations, which can create challenges
such as limitations on managerial bandwidth (Narula, 2014) or increased numbers of firm internal boundaries, which are potential sources of politics and strife (Schotter et al, 2017). This diversity in perspectives challenges our understanding of the phenomenon
and call for further research.
Moreover, like production, R&D and innovation processes have become “fine-sliced” and dispersed to different firms around the globe (Andersson et al.,
2016; Cano-Kollmann et al. 2016; Mudambi, 2008). These global outsourcing activities result in a fundamental change of the nature of innovation. For example, many leading multinational enterprises (MNEs) have offshored R&D activities to China and India to
capitalize on country specific assets such as the access to local talent pools (Chen, 2004; Lewin, Massini, and Peeters, 2009), thus generating both permanent relocations (Singh, 2008; Lahiri, 2010) and temporary intrafirm mobility (Choudhury, 2017) that significantly
affect the way knowledge is sourced and recombined within the MNE. These activities are widespread despite the risks arising from poor institutional environments (Zhao, 2006), the potential challenges in managing knowledge workers from emerging economies (Tymon,
Stumpf, and Doh, 2010) or impending issues with the coordination and communication among partner firms (Clampit et al., 2015; Larsen
et al., 2013).
Therefore, innovation increasingly takes place in global networks, where a variety of business and non-business actors from a range of
locations participate in distinct ways to access to, generate and combine new knowledge (Levin and Barnard, 2013; Perri, Scalera, and Mudambi, 2017; Tzabbar and Vestal, 2016). An implication of this trend is a firm’s connectedness to the global innovation
network, which should be a key feature of its innovation strategy, its capabilities, and its value-capture dynamics (Hannigan et al., 2015; Lorenzen and Mudambi, 2013; Perri et al., 2017).
This special issue aims to improve our understanding on the widespread diffusion of GVCs and its influence on the nature of innovation across country borders.
We call for original contributions that shed light on how, where and when innovation happens in GVCs, by exploring the heterogeneity of participating actors, governance modes, knowledge networks’ linkages, and outcomes involved in internationally distributed
innovation processes. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions adopting different perspectives, focusing on different levels of analysis, and applying different research methodologies. We particularly welcome empirical papers that make use of
original data and multi-disciplinary theoretical perspectives. Possible research questions that would suit with this special issue include, but are not limited to the following:
· Which
factors drive the emergence of global innovation networks within GVCs? Do these factors differ from the drivers of global production networks?
· To
what extent does the division of labor in innovation co-evolve with the division of labor in production? How do such co-evolution patterns influence the nature of innovation within global networks and their organization over time?
· Which
types of linkages and connectivity channels are most conducive to knowledge exchange and creation in global innovation networks mediated by GVCs? Which characteristics of such linkages and channels affect the performance of the resulting innovation? Which
kind of frictions do they generate to established knowledge creation modes in MNEs?
· What
are the most widespread governance modes for the management of global innovation networks in GVCs? How do they affect value-creation and value-capture dynamics of MNEs and other participating actors, and under which boundary conditions?
· What
are the key coordinating roles that ensure an effective orchestration of global innovation networks? What actors are most likely to take them on?
· To
what extent has the role of geographical proximity changed as an enabler of actors’ interaction? Which formal and informal mechanisms can be leveraged in global innovation networks to balance local and global interactions?
· How
do GVCs-mediated innovation networks differ across industries? How do industrial and institutional changes affect such global innovation networks over time?
· How
does the geographical distribution of GVCs affect the dispersion of global innovation networks, and vice-versa? How does such relationship affect the nature of innovation?
· How
do patterns of connectedness within and across GVC innovation networks differ depending on the level of development of the country or region? Which country- or region-level specific characteristics play a key role?
· How
do actors from emerging and peripheral regions participate in GVC innovation networks? Under which circumstances are these actors able to upgrade their position in global networks?
· Does
the entry of emerging economies in GVCs-mediated innovation networks threaten or buttress knowledge creation in advanced economies?
Submission process
Authors should submit complete manuscripts between the 1st and the 31st of May 2018 via the JWB EVISE online submission system at https://www.evise.com/profile/#/JWB/login.
To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for consideration for this special issue, it is important that authors select ‘SI:
Innovation in GVCs’ when they reach the “Article Type” step in the online submission process. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the JWB Guide for Authors available on the journal web page. All submitted manuscripts will be subject to the
JWB’s blind review process.
Research Data
Research data forms the backbone of research articles and provides the foundation on which knowledge is built. Researchers are increasingly encouraged,
or even mandated, to make research data available, accessible, discoverable and usable. Although not mandatory, the journal encourages authors to submit their data at the same time as their manuscript. Further information can be found at:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/author-services/research-data
Questions about the Special Issue may be directed to the guest editors or supervising editor:
Ari Van Assche, HEC Montréal, [log in to unmask]" class="">[log in to unmask]
Kristin Brandl, University of Victoria, [log in to unmask]" class="">[log in to unmask]
Alessandra Perri, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, [log in to unmask]" class="">[log in to unmask]
Vittoria G. Scalera, University of Amsterdam, [log in to unmask]" class="">[log in to unmask]
Bjoern Ambos, University of St. Gallen, [log in to unmask]" class="">[log in to unmask]
References
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Prof. Dr. Björn Ambos
Director, Institute of Management (IFB)
Senior Editor, Journal of World Business
University of St. Gallen
Dufourstrasse 40a
CH 9000 St. Gallen (Switzerland)
Fon ++41 (0) 71 / 224 7610, Fax ++41 (0) 71 / 224 2355
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
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