Constructing national innovative capacity in globalization: The network autocorrelation perspective

Globalization has highlighted change in national technology capability. Exogenous factors drive a country towards technological progress, and drive economic growth via international technology diffusion. Previous studies have stressed that innovative capacity is determined by regional or local social systems. This paper reconsiders these studies and develops a new perspective of evaluating national innovative capacity. This method employs a network autocorrelation model which simultaneously considers both endogenous determiners and exogenous influence on national innovative capacity. Data from 42 countries from 1997 to 2002 are utilized to empirically examine their network relationship and innovation performance. The analytical results not only demonstrate the effect of domestic determiners with differences global context and their differential context attribute influence on national innovative performance more by network positioning than by network partnership, but also exhibit important differences between the alternate channels of international technology diffusion and their differential effects on innovative performance. This finding provides a new perspective for science and technology policy makers.