Title:
Essays on Resources and Innovation
Essays on Resources and Innovation
Author(s)
Zhou, Shibo
Advisor(s)
Thompson, Peter
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Abstract
External resources play a crucial role in fostering innovation by allowing individuals and firms to actively seek new knowledge and create novel products alongside their routine operations. In my dissertation, I investigate the impact of external resources in three distinct forms: consumers, award authorities, and foreign governments.
Online user reviews are an important external information source for both consumers and producers. While the impact of reviews on consumer purchasing behavior has drawn much attention in the literature, whether it can influence producers in terms of future product development remains unclear. In Chapter 1, I examine the role of user reviews on product development and assess how the impact varies across different types of reviews. Analyzing textual data from a two-sided platform using NLP techniques, I evaluate the effect of review ratings on video game updates. The empirical results show that games with more design-related reviews have a higher probability of updates in the following month when users are not satisfied. Moreover, incumbent firms with more resources and capabilities can learn from reliability-related reviews for more complicated product development. The developed updates are positively correlated with the re-engagement of inactive users. My findings show that producers learn from users to absorb ideas about subsequent product development, and the relationship is heterogeneous across different dimensions of the reviews and producers. I discuss the strategic implications of the results for further development by producers, as well as the importance of platform review systems governance.
While innovations are often critical to the growth of firms, such firm-level outcomes emerge from the actions of organizational members who seek novel knowledge. Chapter 2 (co-authored with Jessica Li) develops and tests a model examining how status gain impacts individual novel knowledge adoption and subsequent performance. The model is tested using longitudinal data from a sample of book authors. Results indicate that status gain is associated with a higher level of novelty adoption, and the effect is more pronounced when the authors do not have other sources of income. Adoption is positively associated with subsequent performance, measured by online ratings and easiness of passing through the publishers. This chapter contributes to knowledge management literature by demonstrating the unique effect of status gain on individual-level knowledge searching and adding to the evidence on how these two activities are present at the individual level.
The last external resource that I am examining is government support, which has been accounting for regional innovation growth. in Chapter 3 (co-authored with Kedong Chen and Xiaojin Liu), I analyze the unintended consequences of foreign government policies on domestic inventors. In 2009, the Chinese government launched the policy of ``national innovative cities'' to support the innovation of firms in selected regions. But the unintended consequence of the policy is unclear at the inventor level, in particular on those foreign inventors who have experience working with Chinese firms that are exposed to the policy intervention. Our research is guided by the research question: \textit{How does government support influence foreign inventors who have collaborated with domestic firms before?} By employing the difference-in-differences (DiD) technique in the quasi-experimental setting, we examine the influence of government intervention on foreign partners. We find that foreign inventors who have established relationships with firms in selected cities experience an increase in collaborators and innovations. We further show that inventors with less patent stock take better advantage of cross-border government support. Taken together, the findings of the study suggest that government support can facilitate unintended cross-border knowledge flows and strengthen the innovation performance of ``treated'' foreign inventors.
Overall, this dissertation enhances our comprehension of how firms and individuals respond to changes in external resources.
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Date Issued
2023-07-31
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Dissertation