Zhejiang – Leeds Joint Innovation Seminar was successfully held on the afternoon of June 8, 2022, organized by the Zhejiang & Leeds Joint Institute. The forum was held online through zoom, with a teacher and Ph.D. candidate from each side sharing their recent research. The seminar was co-chaired by associate professor WANG Song from the School of Management, Zhejiang University, and professor Nick Williams from the University of Leeds Business School, and was attended by nearly 100 students and teachers from both sides.
At the beginning of this seminar, professor Lynda Song from the University of Leeds gave an overview of Leeds and Hangzhou city and the development of the two universities, followed by a presentation of the newly established Zhejiang & Leeds Joint Institute website and its functions, expressing the expectation of close cooperation between the two sides.
Next, the four presenters shared their research in turn. Associate professor WANG Song from Zhejiang University hosted the first half of the forum and Dr. Joana Pereira and WANG Peiwen from the University of Leeds Business School presented first.
Dr. Joana Pereira shared a conceptual paper about crowds forms. Scholars and practitioners have a growing interest in crowdsourcing and online communities, which can create knowledge and stimulate innovation beyond the boundaries of the firm. Then she compared crowdsourcing, online communities and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) from the generativity and governance perspectives, which are three kinds of typical crowd forms. Finally, Dr. Pereira discussed the capacity for exploration and generativity of different forms of organizing crowds, types of governance and the match of crowd governance with generativity outputs. She proposed that crowd forms of organizing are towards the “logic of openness, sharing, choice, distant search, intrinsic motivation, and communities”.
WANG Peiwen shared her dissertation’s framework. Based on the background and meaning of digital transformation, she intends to explore its antecedents. Considering the crucial role of managers in shaping firms’ decisions, this research is based on the upper echelon theory and investigates the relationship between CEO characteristics and firms’ digital transformation. After reviewing the highly related literature, she put forward several questions, such as “What is digital attention of CEO? How to measure digital attention of CEO? What is digital competence of CEO? How to measure digital competence of CEO? How to measure digital transformation? How can board directors and C-suite members contribute to digital transformation?” She intends to answer these questions through her dissertation and contribute to the upper echelon theory and digital transformation literature.
The second half of the forum was hosted by Professor Nick Williams from Leeds University and Dr. ZOU Tengjian and LU Qingyun from Zhejiang University shared their research.
LU Qingyun displayed her research about indirect ties. Based on the background of "conflicting investments", she put forward the research question: How do a new venture’s indirect ties to competitors via the shared venture capital (VC) firm influence its intention to form an investment tie with the VC firm? Based on the social network literature from the information perspective, this research considers indirect ties as the information channel and points out that indirect ties formation may both result in information access and information leakage. She hypothesized that there will be an inverted U-shaped relationship between new ventures’ indirect ties to competitors and their intention to form investment ties and further explored the moderating effects from the perspectives of market conditions, VC firms and new ventures’ characteristics. Leveraging China’s VC industry as a research context, this research tests the abovementioned hypotheses and intends to contribute to network embeddedness, interfirm relationship and VC firms’ decision-making literature.
Dr. ZOU Tengjian presented his research about online crowdsourcing platforms. Organizations are increasingly using online crowdsourcing platforms to seek creative solutions for a variety of problems. Existing research has indicated that teams usually outperform solo entrants in crowdsourcing contests. On this basis, this research proposes the question: What factors can drive individuals to team up with others to enter crowdsourcing contests? This research reviews the homophily, status and momentum literature and explores the relationship among status similarity, performance momentum similarity and tie formation. Collecting data from Kaggle (an online crowdsourcing contest community), this research verifies these hypotheses using rare event logit regression and other models for robust check, and expects to contribute to homophily theory and burgeoning literature.
The online seminar ended successfully with a lively discussion for more than 2 hours between Chinese and British scholars. Professor Nick Williams and WANG Song summarized the research of the four presenters. Finally, Professor Lynda Song and DU Jian, co-chairs of the Zhejiang & Leeds Joint Institute, made the concluding remarks and then appreciated both Chinese and British scholars for their support of this seminar.
The second online seminar will be held on October, 2022. Welcome to all teachers and students!
Editor: LU Qingyun, ZHU Yudi
Picture Source：Qianku
