ABSTRACT Biodiversity loss is increasingly recognized as a grand challenge requiring new forms of innovation, coordination, and knowledge integration across organizational and institutional boundaries. While digital technologies have substantially advanced how biodiversity is monitored, measured, and managed, less is known about how digital platforms and their underlying infrastructures can support innovation processes aimed at biodiversity protection and regeneration. This paper offers a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of research connecting digital platforms, their infrastructural foundations, and biodiversity, based on a dataset of 528 scientific publications. Using co‐citation and keyword co‐occurrence analyses, the study maps the intellectual structure and evolution of this emerging field and identifies five promising research frontiers: platform governance for collective action, biodiversity data infrastructures, innovation for biodiversity, digital platforms as innovation intermediaries, and the orchestration of scalable nature‐based solutions. Building on these findings, the paper develops an integrative framework explaining how platform design and governance shape organizational coordination, knowledge integration, and innovation mechanisms, ultimately influencing biodiversity outcomes. The findings reveal that existing research remains largely technology‐driven, with a strong emphasis on monitoring and biodiversity data generation, while questions related to platform governance, ecosystem orchestration, and biodiversity valorization remain comparatively underdeveloped. By repositioning digital platforms as organizational infrastructures for biodiversity‐oriented innovation, rather than merely technological tools for ecological monitoring, this study contributes to the literature on digital innovation, platform ecosystems, and R&D management, while outlining a future research agenda for designing innovation ecosystems capable of supporting biodiversity‐positive transformation.
ABSTRACT Cross‐regional collaboration plays a growing role in firm innovation, yet interregional institutional differences create frictions that undermine the quality of collaborative outcomes. Whether institutional distance in intellectual property protection (IPP) reduces collaborative innovation quality and whether professional intermediaries can alleviate these frictions remain open questions. This study investigates how interregional distance in IPP (DIPP) affects interregional collaborative patent quality (ICPQ) using extensive 2007–2022 collaborative invention patent data from Chinese A‐share listed firms. We find that greater DIPP significantly reduces ICPQ, as divergent IPP regimes erode mutual trust, hinder knowledge sharing, and raise coordination and enforcement costs between partners. Patent agency experience effectively mitigates this adverse effect, suggesting that professional intermediaries help bridge institutional gaps between collaborating regions. These findings hold across a range of robustness tests and an instrumental variable analysis addressing endogeneity. The study contributes to the institutional distance literature by identifying patent agency expertise as a mechanism through which firms can navigate interregional institutional frictions. It also offers practical guidance for firms and policymakers seeking to leverage patent agency services to support high‐quality cross‐regional innovation.
ABSTRACT Complementarities in Platform‐based Innovation Ecosystems (PIEs) are crucial for collaborative technological innovation (TECI), yet how they influence TECI remains underexplored. Therefore, by integrating Resource Dependence Theory and Dynamic Capabilities Theory, this study empirically examined the relationships between two key complementarities (supermodular and unique) and TECI. With a sample of 203 technology firms, this study demonstrates that: (a) supermodular complementarities are more strongly positively associated with TECI than unique ones; (b) orchestrators' platform capabilities and interorganizational trust significantly moderate these complementarities–TECI links, with moderating effects varying by complementarity type. Theoretically, this study advances literature on complementarities–TECI relationships in PIEs. Managerially, it provides practical insights into effectively managing complementarities for TECI performance.
ABSTRACT High‐tech firms must achieve organizational resilience (OR) to remain viable in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. Although specific dynamic capabilities (DCs), particularly integrative and reconfiguring capabilities, allow such firms to integrate and complement resource/capability gaps and align resources to maintain evolutionary fitness and develop different types of innovations to become resilient, how they leverage both to achieve OR in VUCA environments remains unexplored to date. This study uses a multiple‐case study approach to explore how high‐tech firms achieve OR by leveraging integrative and reconfiguring capabilities and different types of innovations in VUCA environments. This study finds that high‐tech firms focus on market dynamics, adaptive management innovations, and efficiency‐driven management and process innovations to become resilient. They develop these innovations using proactive and time‐oriented, support activities‐focused, and technology‐driven reconfiguring capabilities, respectively. Additionally, they use ambidexterity‐focused integrative capability to develop supply chain adaptive product innovations and extended technology leveraging market innovations to become resilient. The deployment of complementarity‐oriented integrative capability is found useful in building existing technology leveraging market innovations that underlie firm resilience. This study contributes to the innovation management literature by offering a granular, comprehensive strategic understanding that incorporates both foundations (DCs) and key drivers (innovations) to achieve OR in VUCA environments. It provides managers with nuanced insights for use in developing overarching R&D and innovation strategies by effectively allocating and renewing resources using feature‐specific integrative and reconfiguring capabilities to develop diversified, distinctive types of innovations that provide firms with resilience to support operational continuity in VUCA environments.
ABSTRACT Digital transformation and Artificial Intelligence are reshaping innovation processes while placing renewed emphasis on the skills required to generate and govern technological change. This editorial argues that skills remain under‐theorised in R&D Management despite their growing relevance for firms, policymakers and societies. Building on contributions to the Special Issue, we propose a multi‐level framework linking individual abilities, organisational capabilities and macro‐level human capital. The framework conceptualises skills as both antecedents and outcomes of innovation, co‐evolving with digital technologies through cross‐level mechanisms including policy drivers, organisational learning, capability renewal, systemic spillovers and societal upgrading. We identify key conceptual, methodological and empirical blind spots including static views of skills, limited longitudinal evidence, outdated indicators and insufficient attention to hybrid skill profiles. We conclude by outlining a research agenda that calls for co‐evolutionary models, real‐time data infrastructures, advanced methods, firm–university data partnerships, and updated measurement frameworks to strengthen the study of skills and innovation in the digital transformation era.
