The Financial Impact of Patents on SMEs in China: Empirical Evidence from Pharmaceutical Sector

With the disruptive technology innovation time arrival, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have been the motor of innovation and played an increasingly major role in national economic development. As the shift towards an ‘open innovation’ paradigm, awareness of intellectual property rights has increased, and patents have been an important tool for Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises. Considering its mass production of low-level generic drugs, there are still many arguments about its lack of innovation. This article aims to identify if and how patents, as essential indicators of innovation, generate financial performance measured by SMEs in the pharmaceutical sectors. Patent data are a vital source of competitive intelligence. A positive association was found between annually added patents and gross sales. Many other patent indicators, such as the number of forward citations and patent transfer, were statistically significant. Moreover, the results suggested that there was a one-year lag between patent publication and financial performance. A series of patent quantity and quality indicators have shown significant effects on the financial performance of Chinese pharmaceutical enterprises. These patents generate a positive financial impact, which builds up a solid basis for keeping sustainable innovation capability in the Chinese drug industry.

India @ 75: Science, Technology and Innovation Policies for Development

India was perhaps the only country among the developing world with a colonial past to have organised and established national science community much before it attained its independence. Nehruvian science and technology (S&T) policy in India’s formative years left a distinct imprint in the post-colonial and post-independent India. With a huge population of nearly 1.35 billion people, India is not dependent on food on outside countries since the 1960s. Green and White Revolutions have made immense contribution to develop scientific and technical capacities in agriculture. India’s innovation system, including higher education, has given her some comparative advantage through ‘human capital’ in information technology, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, space research and so on. In export promotion and economic competitiveness in technology-based industries, we lag compared with East Asian ‘Dragons’. India’s informal sector poses a formidable challenge with more than 95% of the total labour force, about 550 million, 90% of which is 8th class dropouts. When we begin to assess our national innovation system, one feature that stands out to research observers is few islands of excellence and vast ‘hinterlands’ of underdeveloped research potential. There is clearly a gap between theory and practice of science policy in India. Our gross expenditure on research and development as a proportion of gross domestic product remained relatively stagnant and, in fact, receded from 0.8% in the 1990s to 0.7% in 2020. In this period, our neighbour, China, left us far behind in S&T for development.

Book review: Dwaipayan Banerjee (2020), Enduring Cancer: Life Death and Diagnosis in Delhi

Dwaipayan Banerjee (2020), Enduring Cancer: Life Death and Diagnosis in Delhi. Durham and London: Duke Press, 240 pp., $25.95, ISBN: 9781478009559.

Book review: Rana Foroohar (2019). Don’t Be Evil: A Case Against Big Tech

Rana Foroohar (2019). Don’t Be Evil: A Case Against Big Tech. Penguin Books Ltd, xxi+ 337 pp., £14.99 (Paperback).

Book review: Suvobrata Sarkar (2020), Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945

Suvobrata Sarkar (2020), Let there be Light: Engineering, Entrepreneurship and Electricity in Colonial Bengal, 1880–1945. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, xiv+294 pp., £75.

Book review: Benjamin Bratton (2021), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World

Benjamin Bratton (2021), The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. London: Verso Books. 177 pp., £10.99, ISBN: 9781839762567 (Hardback); £10.99, ISBN: 9781839762581 (eBook).

Measuring Technological Collaboration on Blockchain Based on Patents: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Blockchain has been regarded as an emerging global phenomenon in the field of new technologies. However, the existing literature still lacks descriptions of the cooperation characteristics and innovation landscape of blockchain. This study uses the social network analysis method to compare the development of blockchain technology and technological collaboration in China and in the United States based on patent data. Our analyses suggest that the number of blockchain patent applications in China is increasing rapidly due to the Chinese Government developing consistent national strategies for blockchain technology. In all, both countries have notable agglomerations in a few geographical areas or cities. However, the university or enterprise block in the United States has broader and deeper cooperation, unlike the Chinese university or enterprise block, which is more inclined to cooperate within blocks and has more isolated blocks. Lastly, there are various patent attributes-influencing factors behind the importance of node cooperation. The results show that the degree of cooperation of cooperative inventors or important patents is greater in China’s cooperation network, while in the United States, the influence of enterprises rather than universities or individuals is greater.

Channeling Facts, Crouching Rumours: Taiwan’s Post-Truth Encounter with the Covid Pandemic

This study examines the confrontation between Taiwan and Covid in the period before the virus finally invaded and spread widely on the island in May 2021. While the general approach to Taiwan’s success in keeping the virus out is historical, stating the policy lessons learned from previous anti-pandemic experience, the study focuses on how these coping strategies were able to be made and conducted with little disruption from misinformation and conspiracy theories. Inspired by Sheila Jasanoff’s notion of how science and technology are received through different political and policy systems, and by Bruno Latour’s semiotic reflections on the actor-network theory, the STS take on post-truth politics here is institutional and discursive: instead of focusing on the scientific and the misleading in individual policies, I provide an ethnography of rumour and scientific discourse on Covid, capturing their interactions and net effects in the context of policy discussions. Following closely the daily press conferences held by the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), the only official information source for the Covid pandemic, I argue that discursive frames were made upon the limited information given and few confirmed cases found. Through the expert authority and ‘what if?’ scenarios seen at these conferences, Taiwan’s anti-Covid policies came to be presented as a narrative on crises and what the government was doing to get over them, and rumours were either ignored or marginalised. Meanwhile, though disputes and speculations on pandemic control did exist among experts, they only surfaced after the local outbreak, whereupon conspiracy theories flared up, challenging the already exhausted CECC. Together, the excessive information by experts, health professionals, policy analysists and talkshow hosts composes a ‘post-truth normal’ that has started to place Taiwan’s democracy and its trust in expertise on trial.

Can Government Subsidies Promote the TFP of Enterprises? The Mediating Effect of R&D Decisions

This article empirically analyses the effect of government subsidies on total factor productivity (TFP) based on the data of listed manufacturing companies in China. The results indicate that government subsidies increase total productivity directly as well as indirectly by increasing R&D investment. The positive effect of government subsidies on TFP is higher in non-state-owned enterprises (non-SOEs) than in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), higher in central SOEs than local SOEs and higher in enterprises with lower rather than higher TFP. Furthermore, the mediating effects of R&D decisions also differ among different enterprises. Therefore, the government should implement differentiated subsidy policies to promote enterprises’ TFP.

What Drives Creative Crowdsourcing? An Exploratory Study on the Persuasion of Digital Storytelling

Crowdsourcing enterprises increasingly seek to attract and persuade makers to contribute their creativity and wisdom through digital storytelling, however, what are the effective components of digital storytelling and the persuasive effect of digital storytelling on creative crowdsourcing intention are still unclear. To fill this gap, this study explores how digital storytelling persuades makers to generate creative crowdsourcing behavioural intention by utilising Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). Results reveal that the persuasion activity of digital storytelling has a positive effect on creative crowdsourcing intention. The effective components of digital storytelling are mainly composed of aesthetic perception, narrative structure and self-reference. UTAUT and its four core concepts (performance expectation, effort expectation, social influence and facilitating condition) mediate the impact of digital storytelling on the creative crowdsourcing intention, which reveals the persuasive source of digital storytelling. We highlight the theoretical implications as well as the practical applications in creative crowdsourcing.