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The paper aims to study the relevance of the German historical school and American Institutionalism for contemporary research in social sciences. The subject scope of the paper is to trace how concepts, ideas, and frameworks trickle from the historical school into later research programs.

The methodology of the paper is a textual analysis of articles and books that either relates the relationship between the historical school and the institutionalism or make explicit or implicit references to the most important concepts and methodologies in these schools.

The paper has two main findings. The first is that Commons was heavily influenced by Weber's ideal‐types when he wrote his most important book Institutional Economics. The second is that concepts and methodologies used by the historical school and American institutionalism are used in nearly all areas of the social sciences. But the researchers seldom make explicit references to these schools.

A limitation of the present paper is that it draws too a very limited extent directly on the publications of the German historical school. Future research could try and reconstruct how the American instutionalists came to the conclusions they did on the historical school. It is possible that differences in political opinions and competition between two schools with partly similar messages prompted writers like Veblen and Commons to exaggerate differences of opinion.

One important contribution of the paper is the discussion of the influences the historical school had on leading institutionalists. Another important contribution is the exploration of present and future research projects that could benefit from revisiting the theories and methodologies of the historical school and institutionalism. By making more explicit the references to these schools, new insights can be gained on how to develop research methodologies and understanding the limits and potentials of pursuing a research approach.

The purpose of this paper is to find the specific competitive industries in emerging industries of strategic importance of each province in China in order to provide references for industrial cultivation and development.

This paper uses quantitative analysis methods on RCA and R&D efficiency.

Different provinces have specific competitive emerging industries of strategic importance. Taking biotechnology, equipment manufacturing, and new generation of information technology industry as examples, this paper finds: for the advanced equipment manufacturing industry, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Guizhou, Tianjin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Jiangxi provinces have obvious characteristics and relatively high R&D efficiency; for bio‐technology, Jiangsu, Henan, Jiangxi, Hunan, Zhejiang and Shandong provinces have obvious characteristics and relatively high R&D efficiency; and for the next generation of the information technology industry, Jiangsu, Guangdong, Fujian, Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai provinces have obvious characteristics and relatively high R&D efficiency.

This study is limited by lack of industrial comprehensiveness so that more statistical data about emerging industry of strategic importance is needed for more in‐depth analysis.

The identification of specific competitive emerging industry of strategic importance of each province will give managers and policy makers train of thought for the cultivation and development of strategic emerging industry and make future policies more targeted.

The paper contributes to the research on the differentiated cultivation and development tactics of strategic emerging industry by, respectively, finding out the specific competitive emerging industries of each province in China.