Industry Growth, Climate, and Trade

University technology transfer in China: A Literature Review and Taxonomy

Aihua Chen
Donald Patton
Martin Kenney
2016

The Chinese university system is one of the world’s largest academic research performers and technology transfer is one of the system’s central roles. Academic interest in Chinese university technology transfer in both the West and China has increased in parallel. This review aims to outline what is known and evaluate the state of research about university technology transfer in China. To be comprehensive, uniquely this review considers the relevant journal articles in both English and Chinese languages. The major themes and methodologies used by authors are identified. The evolution...

What Is the Core Tech of a Company Worth? It Depends Who Is Asking!

Helena Malikova
2017

Patents and brand names are only two examples of a broad category of disembodied assets from which firms derive revenue, referred to as “intangible assets.” Intangible assets pose a challenge for traditional financial valuation models for many reasons. Because intangible assets lack physicality, companies can easily transfer them internally from one subsidiary to another and among different countries. Aside from this difficulty in precisely determining their financial value, companies can use intangible assets as a profit-shifting tool in tax-planning schemes. In the course of their daily...

Unicorns, Cheshire cats, and the new dilemmas of entrepreneurial finance?

Martin Kenney
John Zysman
2019

This essay examines the implications of the evolving environment for the formation and financing of new firms in the United States. After the dot.com crash of 2000, there was a regime change in new firm formation and the number of firms that exited through an initial public stock offering. This change was made possible by the decreased cost, increased speed, and ease of market entry due to availability of open source software, digital platforms, and cloud computing. This facilitated a proliferation of startups seeking to disrupt incumbent firms in a wide variety of business sectors. The...

Beyond Hype and Despair: Developing Healthy Communities in the Era of Intelligent Tools

John Zysman
Martin Kenney
Laura Tyson
2019

There is much we do not know and cannot know about the socioeconomic impacts of intelligent machines. The impacts will be driven by business strategies that differ by sector and country. “Good jobs” strategies are possible. It is important to identify and strengthen the factors, including policies, that encourage them. Demographics will certainly affect the outcomes. Powerfully and importantly, the narratives about the benefits and costs of the technologies will affect the speed and breadth of the deployment of intelligent tools....

Global Competitors? Mapping the Internationalization Strategies of Chinese Digital Platform Firms

Kai Jia
Martin Kenney
John Zysman
2018

The recent emergence of Chinese digital platform firms, whose size rivals that of the US platform giants, has attracted much popular interest. Given the size and increasing technical sophistication of these firms, there has been increasing interest in whether they have developed sufficient capacities and resources to become global-class competitors for the reigning US platform giants. The authors assembled a database of all overseas operations of the Chinese platform firms. Nine of them have foreign operations, with Tencent and Alibaba being the most important offshore investors. The...

From Great Power Politics to a Strategic Vacuum: Origins and Consequences of the TPP and TTIP

Melissa K. Griffith
Richard Steinberg
John Zysman
2018

In this paper, we place the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) into broader geo-political and economic context given the current Trump Administration's withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the loss of momentum for TTIP. Both TPP and TTIP sought to provide key tactical solutions to the particular trade/investment problems participating states faced. For the U.S. government, these free trade agreements also represented a geo-political undertaking, an attempt to once again set trade rules in light of deadlock in the WTO. Ultimately, the inability of the...