Abstract Global value chains have long driven economic efficiency, but the escalating US-China semiconductor conflict has rendered this logic obsolete. In the era of technology sovereignty, strategic autonomy and resilience have become essential for countering weaponised interdependence. R&D plays a central role, serving three functions: building core competencies, strengthening absorptive capacity, and enhancing strategic negotiating power. This study examines South Korea’s Materials, Parts, and Equipment (MPE) R&D programme, launched in 2020 in response to Japan’s export restrictions. Analysis of policy additionality shows the programme significantly contributed to securing competitiveness, establishing a self-sustainable collaborative ecosystem, and reducing over-reliance. Robustness checks confirm these effects are specifically attributable to the strategic MPE programme rather than general government R&D support. The findings demonstrate the multifaceted roles of R&D, showing that strategic R&D avoids both technological isolationism and excessive dependency, providing validation for technology sovereignty frameworks and guidance for innovation policy in an era of techpolitics.
Abstract This manuscript deepens the concept of Stockholm Science as an analytical framework for understanding the naturalization of editorial and evaluative domination in the contemporary scientific system. Building on Robert K. Merton’s Matthew effect and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of scientific capital, it argues that scientific inequalities are reproduced not only through structural mechanisms but also through symbolic processes of internalization and legitimation by peripheral agents. The analysis centers on the APC-based open-access publishing model and its articulation with productivism evaluation systems, showing how the capacity to publish increasingly depends on financial resources and restricted editorial circuits. The manuscript further examines publishing agreements in which the state assumes responsibility for APC payments, interpreting this shift as the institutionalization of Stockholm Science, whereby scientific dependence becomes state based. Such policies may relieve individual researchers but ultimately reinforce market logics and persistent inequalities across regional, institutional, and epistemic dimensions.
Research on science and innovation policy in higher education has been dominated by evidence from Europe and North America. This study addresses that gap by examining how universities respond to the InES R&D programme in Chile. Drawing on a neo-institutionalist framework and a qualitative multiple-case study of 18 universities, findings reveal a pattern of partial convergence: universities exhibit isomorphic adoption of formal structures such as innovation directorates and strategic plans, yet these changes remain loosely coupled from core academic practices. Responses are path-dependent: research-intensive, private, and regional institutions translate policy incentives differently based on research capacity, governance model, and territorial position. Policy implementation thus generates formal harmonisation alongside substantive diversity. We argue that universities are active sites of translation, where global innovation scripts are reinterpreted through local institutional logics, contributing systematic empirical evidence from Latin America to international debates on the governance of research and innovation in higher education.
The role of artificial intelligence applications in the labor market has attracted considerable attention. In this paper, we investigate the effect of artificial intelligence applications on researchers' wages. Using data from Chinese listed firms from 2017 to 2023, we find that artificial intelligence applications have a positive impact on researchers' wages. The finding remains valid after a series of robustness tests and is attenuated for private firms and high-tech firms, while the regional high-skilled labor supply fails to affect the relationship. Mechanism tests suggest that artificial intelligence applications are associated with reductions in non-labor R&D costs and the improvement of the human capital structure of R&D teams. The findings of this paper provide novel and distinct evidence on the effect of artificial intelligence applications on wages and employment in the high-skilled labor market.
Digital technologies have reshaped economic organization through three successive waves: the emergence of internet-enabled markets and platform ecosystems; the internal reconfiguration of firms through digital transformation; and, most recently, the embedding of artificial intelligence within organizational decision processes. Each wave has not only altered how value is created but has also imposed new demands on the governance frameworks societies use to manage technological change. This article traces that trajectory, argues that AI-mediated organizing poses governance challenges qualitatively more complex than those of earlier waves, and draws implications for industry leaders and, centrally, for public policymakers. Issues of algorithmic accountability, labor market resilience, competitive fairness in data-driven industries, and the broad diffusion of AI benefits each require dedicated and forward-looking policy attention.
