A constellation of digital technologies is triggering the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), yet how firms in catching-up economies build mature inventive capabilities in this new paradigm remains underexplored. This study examines this capability-building process through the lens of firm-level digital technological diversification. Using a comprehensive patent dataset of Chinese listed companies (2000-2020), we investigate the interplay between path-dependent capability accumulation and path-breaking learning. Our findings reveal a profound degree of path dependence in 4IR technological diversification within firms, particularly in the creation of enabling technologies that power data-driven value creation. Furthermore, while internal innovation efforts and ownership types have limited impact on altering this path dependence, we identify a critical exception: in application domains, simultaneous engagement with research alliances and public science bases can effectively facilitate path-breaking learning. These findings illuminate the heterogeneous learning regimes that govern firm-level capability accumulation in the 4IR era.
Demand-side government procurement policies play a crucial role in promoting industrial modernization and high-quality development, and they profoundly shape the evolution of regional industrial structures. Using city-pair panel data from 2015 to 2022, this paper examines the impact of cross-regional government procurement on the similarity of industrial structures between cities. The results show that cross-regional procurement significantly increases industrial structure similarity, reflecting a form of "desired convergence" driven by coordinated interactions. This effect operates through three main channels: facilitating cross-regional investment expansion, strengthening innovation and R&D collaboration, and reinforcing policy support for resource complementarity. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the effect is more pronounced in non-cluster cities, in cities with similar resource endowments, and when suppliers are predominantly located in southern regions. An extended analysis of broader economic and social outcomes shows that cross-regional procurement helps narrow intercity disparities in the share of technology-intensive firms, employment absorption capacity, corporate social responsibility, and overall firm performance, thereby fostering mutually beneficial outcomes across cities. However, in procurement-originating cities, the improvement in firms' operating performance under such policies remains relatively limited.
Organizational clusters are central to how industries evolve, but their origins remain poorly understood. Existing research explains how spatial agglomerations of similar organizations are recognized and labeled and how they influence behavior, yet it rarely addresses how similarity becomes tractable in the first place within high-dimensional organizational worlds. We develop a Schelling agent-based model that formalizes two mechanisms of dimensional reduction: attribute privileging, in which actors selectively foreground a small subset of identity-relevant features, and correlated attribute environments, representing material and technological worlds exhibiting coherent bundles of capabilities. Across four experiments, we show that spatial agglomeration is unlikely without substantial cognitive or environmental compression, that narrowly privileged attributes can stabilize proto-clusters, and that correlated attributes generate robust and durable agglomerations even without focal attention. Together, these results illuminate how the "places and spaces of organizing" become visible long before formal categories or institutions solidify.
Innovation intermediaries are increasingly mobilized in policy programs to support the adoption and diffusion of digital technologies. Yet we still have a limited understanding of how different types of organizations enact this role and which business models they adopt. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 20 (European) Digital Innovation Hubs in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and the UK, we investigate how intermediaries create and deliver value in policy-driven digital transition initiatives. We identify four recurrent business model configurations that combine technology/sector, or territorial focus (value proposition) with centralized or decentralized governance (value delivery), each associated with specific organizational forms such as Research and Technology Organizations (RTOs), business associations, territorial development organizations, and technology and knowledge transfer networks. The study clarifies how organizational characteristics shape the enactment of digital intermediation and offers guidance for the design and targeting of future policy initiatives.
Industries vary substantially in their evolutionary patterns of market structure and of product architectures. Differences exist in the timing, duration, and severity of the shakeout, and the extent to which architectures evolve towards greater modularity. Existing explanations typically treat these phenomena separately, despite recognizing demand heterogeneity as an important factor in both domains. We develop an evolutionary model that links demand heterogeneity with market and architectural evolution by combining characteristics-based demand with the generalized model of NK landscapes. In our framework, consumer preferences are modeled as weight distributions over product characteristics, while firms compete by searching for better designs through component and architectural innovations. Our results show that the structures of, and changes in, demand heterogeneity jointly shape market structures and product architectures. Under stable preferences, demand shapes market selection, reallocates resources across firms, and constrains the set of viable innovation trajectories. Changing preferences induce path-dependent industry dynamics, affecting the intensity of the shakeout and the speed of architectural change. These findings provide a unified explanation for industry differences in market structure and product architecture, and highlight the central role of demand in shaping both industry lifecycles and technological evolution.
