Innovation, Competition and Regulatory Change: Assessing Interrelationships at the Industry Level

Zusammenfassung

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This paper focuses on the overall themes of the issue to examine the interrelationships between innovation, competition and regulatory change in international business. It provides a synthesis by highlighting recent interlinked developments in two contrasting industries dominated by large multinationals -- pharmaceuticals and automotives, with specific reference to cars. This industry based assessment highlights the technical, economic and regulatory forces that have together changed the business environment, innovation processes and nature of competition in the pharmaceutical and automotive industries.

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Auszug

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Innovation, Competition and Regulatory Change: Assessing Interrelationships at the Industry Level

Introduction

The AIB (UK) conference call for papers on Innovation, Competition and Change, particularly regulatory change, in International Business - the tiiemes on which this focused issue is based - generated a record number of submissions. The focus of the individual contributions was very varied and typically addressed some specialist aspect within one, or at most two, of the three areas, as reflected in the preceding papers. Other major issues covered within the innovation stream elsewhere in the proceedings included sources of product innovation, innovation in information and communication technologies and knowledge acquisition in international business. The competitive opportunities and challenges faced by Western multinationals from me fast growth, emerging economies, unsurprisingly, received substantial attention, as did the role of outsourcing and impact of joint ventures and acquisitions. The competitive behaviour of entrepreneurial small firms, networking and clustering activity also attracted a range of contributions. Intellectual property protection and corporate governance was an important concern among papers dealing with regulatory changes as well as the extent to which firms might need to go beyond the increasing demands of regulation to meet the moral challenges of global capitalism.

International business is a process and, in general terms, while it is clearly necessary to isolate individual aspects of the process in order to study them (see Buckley 2005), the parts are interconnected so it is also important to synthesise them in order to see the interrelationships. In the same way, we felt that while the conference contributions naturally tended to be specialist studies of individual aspects of innovation, competition or regulatory change, it would be useful to draw attention to the interconnections between these processes (and the specialised areas within them) at a broader level. This final paper therefore explores the significance of and interrelationships between aspects of innovation, competition and regulatory change in international business.

The paper focuses on pharmaceuticals and automotives, both of which are very significant industries globally and are dominated to different extents by large multi...

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