This thesis will focus on two related comparative analyses of regional innovation systems (RIS) in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between various innovation-system stakeholders. The former seeks to examine the impact of the governments’ interaction with other stakeholders on the overall innovation performance of the two RIS. The selection of Hong Kong and Shenzhen for comparative analysis is particularly due to the contrasting attitudes of the two governments on innovation. Relying on USPTO patent datasets covering 2001-2015 period as the main indicator for analysis, this study shows no considerable differences in the overall innovation performance of the two RIS despite their vastly dissimilar approaches on innovation.

Given these findin...[ Read more ]

This thesis will focus on two related comparative analyses of regional innovation systems (RIS) in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between various innovation-system stakeholders. The former seeks to examine the impact of the governments’ interaction with other stakeholders on the overall innovation performance of the two RIS. The selection of Hong Kong and Shenzhen for comparative analysis is particularly due to the contrasting attitudes of the two governments on innovation. Relying on USPTO patent datasets covering 2001-2015 period as the main indicator for analysis, this study shows no considerable differences in the overall innovation performance of the two RIS despite their vastly dissimilar approaches on innovation.

Given these findings, the latter seeks to identify other aspects of inter-stakeholder relations that may explain the dynamics of RIS in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Using network analysis of the same patent datasets, I investigate two hints that may offer a clue about their regional innovation dynamics: 1) the nature of inter-organizational linkages, whether direct (through formal collaboration) or indirect (through career mobility), and; 2) the degree of influence exerted by these organizations (from collaboration) and the extent of knowledge spillover (through patterns of individual career mobility between organizations). I find that in the case of Hong Kong, universities are the most influential organizations, and the most dominant type of linkages is university-university relations. With regard to Shenzhen, enterprises exert the most influence in the RIS, with firm-firm linkages dominating the city’s innovation network. Synthesizing the findings from the two analyses, I argue that there is an imbalance in the dynamics of the RIS components, and this may explain why neither approaches by the two governments has resulted in the improvement of RIS performance.