No abstract

Purpose: This study aims to examine the strategic alliance portfolio and the characters of focal firm partners in the eco-friendly car market, and also suggest the important managerial implications and suggestions for firms' managers and policy-makers using the patent information of Toyota and Hyundai as examples. This study identifies the fundamental differences in Hyundai's strategic partnerships through the comparison with Toyota's alliance portfolio. Key literature reviews: This study analyzes the configuration of alliance portfolio using the patent citation information and various patent citation indexes. Many previous studies use patent citation information to analyze the flow of technological knowledge and the relative importance of the technology that companies produce (Hall, Jaffe, & Trajtenberg, 2005). Patents contain a lot of information, which researchers use to derive multiple properties related to technological innovation or technological excellence (Ernst, 2003). Especially, the Current Impact Index (CII), the Technology Strength (TS), the Technology Independence (TI) and the Science Linkage mean the technological innovation of companies (Chang, Chen, & Huang, 2012;Z. Huang et al., 2003;Sung, Wang, Huang, & Chen, 2015).Design/ methodology/ approach: The paper employs patent data for collection of partnership data for both Hyundai and Toyota using joint patent filings, and the alliance portfolios are configured by using co-assignees as partners. In addition, we use patent citation indexes to analyze the relationship between firms' technological alliance and innovation capability.(Expected) findings/results: The results of this study show that; 1) Toyota is actively developing joint R&D activities but, Hyundai is not. Because of this, Toyota has the advantageous position to obtain knowledge and technology than Hyundai due to the high centrality in alliance portfolio. 2) The alliance portfolio of Toyota and Hyundai can be categorized four groups by the degree of collaboration and patent quality. 3) There are differences in the properties of four groups of Toyota's alliance portfolio and Hyundai's alliance portfolio. Research limitations/ implications: This study has several limitations. First, patent information indicates only the cross-section of the company's innovation. Second, joint patents are not the only outcome of joint R&D, and comprise only a very small part of the output from joint R&D activities. In spite of these limitations, the findings suggest how firms can catch up to access the automotive bioplastic market, and offers contributions to theories related to portfolios.

Although it is conventional wisdom that innovation requires free mind, diversity, or creativity all of which are closely associated with political and organizational decentralization, it is in fact more politically centralized countries in East Asia that successfully capitalized on innovation to catapult their economies onto the growth trajectory. Scholars have thus wondered if this is an exception rather a rule. Are more centralized countries innovative? Existing empirical research has produced mixed results. This study introduces a new perspective on this issue. Rather than the degree of centralization found in formal institutions, we focus on non-institutional or informal dimensions of centralization particularly associated with culture. Using Hofstede's cross-national dataset capturing national culture, we explore how different dimensions of national culture are linked to national innovative capacity as proxied by patents. Our preliminary findings from the analysis of 34 OECD member states based on the patent data extracted from the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) database suggest that non-institutional dimensions of centralization account more for the variations in national rates of patents per capita than more formal aspects of centralization measured by traditional political datasets such as POLCON. While cultural aspects have been examined in technology management at the individual and the firm level, this study fills a gap in the existing literature by exploring their relationship at the national level. More research is clearly needed to explore the roles of non-institutional features facilitating or hampering innovation.