Catch-up is a well-known and familiar terminology for innovation scholars in developing countries such as Taiwan, Korea and China. The strategy, however, is too difficult to perform in each industry. This study looks into a catch-up strategy that Apple and Xiaomi used and examines the results on the creative imitation of business model in the smartphone industry. It is quite surprising that even Apple is based on catch-up strategy. They wanted to catch-up Nokia. Our case study shows that these two companies quickly caught up with the leaders, and the common feature of their strategy is characterized as creative imitation of business model. Creative imitation of business model is different from creative imitation of innovation. Furthermore, this research confirms that the creative imitation of business model leads to aggressive creative innovation.
In the face of globalization and other recent developments, flagship universities in developing countries must deal with significant challenges to come up with new strategies to serve their respective countries better. They have to confront the issue of international university ranking and its implication on social relevance. They have to remain at the forefront of research as research universities and must lead in promoting internationalization of higher education. More importantly, flagship universities must engage actively in industry-academe-government collaboration as a necessary approach towards strengthening their nations’ innovation systems. This paper is at best conceptual and takes a cursory look at the role of flagship universities in developing countries, citing the case of the University of the Philippines and its strategy towards fulfilling its role as the country’s only national university.
This study starts from the perspective that preparing students for employment is the most important role of undergraduate degree programs. Therefore, we examine the determinants of undergraduate employment, especially highlighting the differences by disciplines. We classify 28 factors into five categories such as personal attributes, entrance attributes, students’ employment-related activities, regular curriculum and employability programs provided by universities. This study is based on data from 7,616 students from a Korean university over four and half years. Findings reveal that university efforts are crucial in engineering. Only exchange programs and employment programs have an impact on science. There are no specific factors in humanities and social science. Grade point average and students’ efforts are important in business. Face-to-face coaching in employability support programs is effective for securing employment except in science disciplines. The study results do not point to the absence of a role of university even in the low employment disciplines. Rather, the issue is that of an over-supply of graduates exceeding job offers that results from the worldwide expansion of higher education services.
This paper focuses on how an integrated or systemic approach is needed to both investigate and connect different kinds of interdisciplinary inquiry and knowledge within and beyond universities to encourage more productive collaboration with the other three ‘macro stakeholders’ - government, business, and the wider community. In this way universities can and should provide a greater leadership role in sustainability, innovation and policy studies. Such a framework is needed to also help to change the view of many that academics should just play a supporting role of providing specialised technical expertise only to the other macro stakeholders. The interdisciplinary and collaborative framework developed here is applied to the on-going water crisis in Malaysia - an exemplary complex problem-solving basis for seeking sustainable policy solutions to diverse challenges. As further discussed, this was applied also in practice to a multi-stakeholder seminar on addressing the difficult policy challenges of the Malaysian water industry and sector.
To counter-attack against piracy, the movie industry is continuously developing new technologies for the protection of intellectual properties, only to find them instantly useless especially in the digital age. This study shifts the focus from technology to customer behavior, and analyzes customer behaviors vis-à-vis piracy using economic models. The theoretical model of optimal holdback strategy under the threat of piracy was derived and the result shows that holdback can be used as a tool not only for hedging the loss due to piracy, but also for reducing piracy. Based on the theoretical model, we suggested proper holdback strategy for each type of movie piracy.
This paper presents how Korea succeeded in developing an indigenous nuclear power plant model over fifty years. Long-lasting national R&D for technical progress and the Korean government for managerial process were the two pillars in the build-up of indigenous Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) technological capabilities. The concept of technological capabilities is used to examine its evolutionary process with a qualitative and longitudinal approach. The government had a developing country ambition to formulate a strategic plan for technical self-reliance on nuclear power plant while establishing the country's institutions and organization structure for the plan. Under the government leadership, it was national R&D that led to the resolution of a good number of technological problems, efficiently, by absorbing imported technologies and effectively adapting them to local circumstances.