Trajectory of innovation in emerging industries: evidence from the global wind power industry

Abstract

This dissertation unpacks "innovation" along its constituent dimensions, namely technological, geographic, and people. I study how these dimensions interact among each other to define the course or trajectory of innovation. The setting for this study is the global wind power industry, a rapidly evolving innovation-intensive emerging industry. The innovations are studied at two levels - location-level and firm-level. At the location-level, I measure breadth and depth of innovation along the three dimensions. I then examine how the innovation breadth and depth at a location impact the locations' innovation performance. I find negative curvilinear effects for both but breadth having a larger impact than depth. Since breadth has the potential to develop earlier than depth, I argue that late entering new locations can catch-up faster with leading incumbent locations in emerging industries. At the firm-level, I study the development of firm's innovation capabilities. A special focus is given to emerging economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) as they start with lower amounts of technological and market knowledge but exhibit a fast catch-up to get on par with the industry leading advanced economy multinationals (AMNEs). EMNEs are catching up with AMNEs even in emerging, high technology industries, where their knowledge-based disadvantages are most severe. I explain this phenomenon by distinguishing between output and innovation capabilities. By comparing the knowledge bases of an industry leading AMNE and a fast follower EMNE, I find that AMNE's knowledge base is deeper and composed of more distinct technology groups than that of the EMNE. Thus, although the EMNE has caught up in terms of output capabilities, it still lags in terms of innovation capabilities. Next, I study closely the process of innovation catch-up by analyzing firms' R&D internationalization strategies. I study EMNE R&D internationalization by comparing it to that by AMNE to find that its purpose and drivers are different for EMNEs. While the internationalization of AMNEs' R&D activities can to a large extent be explained in terms of the twin strategies of competence exploitation and competence creation, EMNE R&D internationalization is rooted in the firms' overall catch-up strategy to get on par with industry leaders. An in-depth comparison of knowledge flows reveals that within AMNEs, headquarters often serves the primary source of knowledge for R&D subsidiaries. In contrast, within EMNEs, headquarters accesses knowledge from R&D subsidiaries in advanced economies for innovation catch-up. Within this dichotomy, accessing is more difficult and slower than sourcing making EMNE innovation catch-up harder and slower.