Knowledge that Transforms

Mass editorial board resignations from journals are an increasingly widespread phenomenon in academic publishing. Breakaway journals are new journals founded by resigning editorial boards to compete with the journal they abandoned. Publishers often respond to these mutinies by re-staffing journal editorships and editorial boards to preserve the journal brand. Zombie journals are established journals that persist following mass resignations. Breakaway and Zombie journals provide an opportunity to empirically examine how removing part of a journal's community from its brand affects subsequent publishing behaviors and niches. This article analyzes early case studies of editorial board mutinies in linguistics, bibliometrics, and mathematics. Difference-in- differences analyses of pre- and post-mutiny journals reveal that the Breakaway journals quickly established market share at the expense of their Zombie counterparts. Post-mutiny Zombie journals exhibited declines in citations received and authorial status, as well as shifts in publishing volume. In both linguistics and bibliometrics, Breakaway journals were largely led and patronized by North American and European authors. This created vacancy chains at the Zombie journals, filled by an influx of China-affiliated authors, revealing unique institutional and cultural scientific reward structures in Chinese science vis-à-vis traditionally leading Western counterparts. Results suggest that academic capital associated with journal brands is mutable and appropriable, providing opportunities for institutional entrepreneurs to reshape academic publishing, as well as their broader intellectual fields. • Editorial mass resignations create rival “Breakaway” and “Zombie” journal pairs. • Breakaway/Zombie splits decouple journal status markers from author communities. • Post-mutiny Zombie journals saw declines in citations, status and Western authors. • China-based author shares rose post-mutiny in the studied Zombie journals. • Findings suggest journal capital can be mutable across brand and community.

The foundation industries that underpin modern economies are undergoing discontinuous transformations around sustainability and decarbonisation. However, key assumptions in the existing innovation literature are based on analyses of a narrow set of industry contexts largely focused on disruptive innovation. Alternative pathways to discontinuous change remain under-researched. This paper presents the first comparative case study of two of the world's most advanced green steel innovation ventures – Stegra and HYBRIT in northern Sweden. The two ventures were set up as, respectively, a start-up and an incumbent-driven joint venture, each with a different strategy for disrupting legacy steelmaking. However, neither followed a path predicted by the innovation literature. We find that the inherent resource constraints that are hallmarks of foundation industries led to a convergence of the two ventures' innovation pathways. We develop theory on discontinuous innovation for foundation industries and argue that system-level drivers, including policy triggers, material resource constraints, and non-material resource enablers shape firm-level innovation pathways. Regardless of their starting point as start-ups or incumbents, ventures in such settings converge on an innovation pathway of creative accumulation rather than creative destruction.

The Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature offers two distinct but insufficiently integrated institutional accounts of US growth dynamics: the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach, emphasising the economy's capacity for radical innovation, and the CPE growth models perspective, which views the US economy as consumption-driven, supported by rising house prices and household debt. This paper argues that these two institutional complexes coexist within the US economy, generating conflicting pressures on innovation capacity that existing CPE frameworks have not adequately theorised. Specifically, the demand-side dynamics sustaining consumption-driven growth, supported by financial product innovations widening access to mortgage credit, may undermine the supply-side conditions underpinning innovation capacity, a cross-level tension that neither the VoC nor the CPE growth models perspective has incorporated. Using error correction models applied to an unbalanced panel of 50 US states from 1975 to 2016, the long-run results show that rising house prices are significant negative long-run predictors of innovation outputs, whilst expansionary state government fiscal expenditure can compensate for these negative effects. Furthermore, left-leaning state governments produce short-run innovation gains but long-run negative effects. Together, these findings suggest that understanding US growth dynamics requires moving beyond frameworks that treat the innovation-and-consumption-oriented institutional complexes as complementary, toward a more integrated account that incorporates the conflicting pressures they generate and the compensatory state government fiscal policies through which those pressures can be managed, with important implications for understanding the conditions underpinning US’ growth and its international economic competitiveness.

Public procurement of innovation (PPI) is increasingly recognised as a powerful demand-side instrument for generating solutions to complex societal challenges. Yet realising this transformative potential requires innovations to scale beyond isolated implementation contexts. We contribute to the literature by bridging innovation scaling and market shaping perspectives to develop a novel conceptual framework for scaling in the context of PPI. We identify three distinct scaling modes: ‘market acceleration’, where buyers stimulate business growth by facilitating innovation development, adoption, and dissemination across contexts, ‘market building’, where buyers aggregate public sector needs and broaden the scope of PPI, and ‘market transformation’, where buyers embed innovations by reshaping socio-technical systems. Through empirical investigation of twelve publicly-funded PPI projects in Finland, we identify scaling practices used by public buyers throughout the procurement lifecycle, spanning information dissemination, demand coordination, and institutional norm-shaping. Our findings advance theoretical understanding of how public procurement shapes innovation scaling, while providing practical insights into mechanisms through which public buyers can strategically influence market development.

The transformation from a fossil-based economy toward the bioeconomy offers a promising avenue for addressing various Sustainable Development Goals but also poses a major societal challenge (SC). Designing effective place-based innovation policies to tackle this SC requires acknowledging that regions differ in their readiness to contribute to the bioeconomy transformation and understanding which place-specific characteristics underpin this readiness. This study was conducted to identify regional characteristics—capturing regional capabilities and resources, network embeddedness, institutional configurations, as well as higher education institutions (HEIs) and the research landscape—that are robustly correlated with regional readiness. We paid particular attention to the role of HEIs because they possess unique capacities to contribute to innovation and transformation. Taking Germany as an example, we measured the regional readiness of the 401 German NUTS-3 regions using the RE-SCORE index and employed Bayesian model averaging to assess the robustness of 55 potential predictor variables. Our findings highlight the potential of rural regions and further show that regional readiness is associated with embeddedness in interregional networks and the prevalence of pro-environmental attitudes. HEIs were found to enhance regional readiness through education rather than research. Relevant research output is generated by research institutes. The results suggest that HEIs can help rural regions leverage their potential.

I propose that the concept of ‘systems of use’ can be a valuable lens for more deeply understanding user innovation processes and outcomes. I define a system of use as a group of components that interact during use to accomplish a system-level goal. Each component, which may be a physical or digital product, or a human behavior, plays a role in a specific system of use by accepting inputs, processing them, and providing outputs within and beyond that system. To date, research on innovation has largely focused on the nature of, and innovative history of, and value of specific product innovations. A system of use perspective adds a focus onto the contexts within whichspecific innovations function. This altered focus, in turn, draws attention to related adaptations and innovations that are often required to integrate specific innovations into such systems. Specifically, a system focus can highlight behavioral system of use components that are often overlooked - especially when they are diffused peer-to-peer rather than being sold on markets. Further, a system focus can document the often rapid changes that end users may make to their own systems of use as they adapt to new circumstances, but without changing the major product components that are normally tracked as a way to identify system change.

We show that culture affects individuals’ participation in science. Using Scopus data on 3.7 million scientists worldwide, we document that women’s representation in science varies across fields and across countries, even within a field. Women’s representation in both STEM and Non-STEM fields is higher in more gender-equal countries and countries with greater academic freedom. Women’s representation is higher in fields with more inclusive cultures. We provide evidence for two channels through which culture affects representation: migration and productivity. For example, female scientists’ location choices appear to be more sensitive to country culture than those of male scientists. Our results highlight that individuals’ careers in science depend on social factors. Thus, a country’s capacity to engage in scientific research — critical for innovation and economic growth — also hinges on social factors. • Gender-equality, not math gaps, predicts women’s STEM and non-STEM representation. • Women’s representation in science is correlated with academic freedom. • Women avoid less inclusive scientific fields when they have greater freedom. • Female scientists migrate to more gender-equal countries. • The “productivity gap” is lower in gender-equal countries.

Using firm-level data from 41 countries, this study investigates how resource-constrained firms can strengthen their resilience to resist the COVID-19 crisis through non-R&D induced innovation. The empirical results show that firms in Middle- and Low-income countries, where access to government aid is often constrained, can enhance their survival prospects by internally upgrading their learning and adaptive capabilities. Specifically, non-R&D induced innovation can effectively substitute for insufficient government financial support by enabling firms to adjust operations and maintain competitiveness during the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings emphasise the importance of jointly considering government support and innovation in firm survival analyses, as omitting either factor may introduce potential omitted variable bias. To address this, supervised learning approaches are employed to predict whether firms that exited had received government support prior to closure. In addition, this study advances the literature by uncovering the complementary roles of innovation and government financial interventions, and highlights context-specific strategies that policymakers should adopt to improve firm resilience amid external shocks. • During crisis, non-R&D innovation boosts survival when government support is limited • Government support enhances survival, but its synergy with innovation varies • Including government support and innovation avoids bias in COVID-19 survival studies • Policies should prioritise adaptive, incremental innovation suited to income contexts