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This study aims at the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, which had an unprecedented negative impact on the Chinese economy, with firms being affected most. Firms differ in terms of their specific internal environment, shaping their ability to respond to the outbreak, so the impact may also vary.

In this paper Chinese listed firms are selected as samples to investigate the mediating effect of prior digital technology on the relationship between R&D (research and development) investment (funds and staff) and firm performance during the epidemic. Firm size and diversification are then introduced as moderating variables to explore the conditional mediating effect of digital technology.

The results indicate that the higher the firm's prior R&D investment, the higher its digital technology level, and thus the stronger its resistance to the epidemic. Moreover, compared with large-scale firms, small-scale firms have the advantage of strategic flexibility to technological changes, which can help them accumulate experience from R&D activities for digital transformation, thus attenuating the negative impact of the COVID-19 on firm performance. Finally, the results also show that digital technology mediates more strongly between R&D investment and firm performance in diversified firms than in centralized firms.

The study builds a mediation model to reveal the process mechanism through which R&D investment affects firm performance via digital technology. Firm size and diversification are then innovatively introduced as situational factors to build the moderated mediation model, which opens up a new perspective for understanding the effect of firm internal factors on the relationship between R&D investment, digital transformation and firm performance.

The authors selected global automobile manufacturing firms whose sales ranked within 100 in the five years from 2014 to 2018 in the Factiva database to examine how the characteristics of a firm's whole network and ego-network in a transnational coopetition network influence network performance.

The authors analyzed the public news of the sample firms about the coopetition by structural content analysis to build the coopetition networks and access to data on the competitive actions of firms. Then, to measure the variables associated with the coopetition network, such as the structural hole, centrality and ego-network stability, the authors use UCINET 6 that is a widely used piece of software for social network analysis to establishing five undirected binary adjacency matrices.

The authors find that a firm's competitive aggressiveness mediates the relationship between a firm's whole network position and network performance that emphasizes the need for integrating competitive dynamics research and coopetition research and shows how valuable insights can be gained through such integration. And the interaction of structural hole and centrality impacts competitive aggressiveness and network performance, and the interaction is different under high and low ego-network stability. The integration of whole network and ego-network literature studies provides new insights into firm network literature.

In the process of cooperation, firms should consider whether they can occupy the structural hole and center as important indicators for partner selection. Too stable relationship will prevent firms from obtaining new resources. Firms should weigh the period of cooperation according to specific situation.

These results indicate that ego-network stability, as an important complementary characteristic of coopetition network, has a significant synergistic effect with structural holes and centrality on competitive aggressiveness and network performance. And these findings expand the current literature on the relationship between characteristics of network, competitive aggressiveness and network performance.

The purpose of this study is to explore the green innovation evolution in coal enterprises in China and the various driving mechanisms influenced by government regulations, enterprise resource capability and supply chain integration.

This paper uses the innovation data of coal enterprises in China for constructing a model to infer how enterprises achieve green innovation (the “hybrid drive effect model”).

This paper shows that various driving modes of green innovation in an enterprise are influenced by government regulations, enterprise resource and capability, supply chain integration and the interaction effects between any two actors.

By examining the evolution process of green innovation in a specific industry from the perspectives of exploitative and exploratory innovation, the paper touches a relatively novel view on green innovation.

This paper aims to enrich our understanding about the factors which encourage health science researchers’ intrinsic motivation. It integrates leadership theories regarding powers from Western and Eastern cultures to build and test a theoretical model linking two types of leadership (empowering leadership and authoritarian leadership) with intrinsic motivation through psychological empowerment.

This paper tested the hypotheses with a sample of 235 postgraduates working in research groups at a medical university in China, using a two-step analytical strategy of structure equation modeling.

The results showed that the proposed mediation model has a satisfactory fit (χ2/df = 2.24, GFI = 0.92, CFI = 0.94, RMSEA = 0.073). This paper found support for the hypotheses that empowering leadership was positively correlated and authoritarian leadership was negatively correlated with intrinsic motivation through psychological empowerment.

This paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the mechanism between leadership-employing powers and intrinsic motivation by an initiative examining a conceptual model including empowering leadership, authoritarian leadership, psychological empowerment and intrinsic motivation. It also provides generalized findings by testing the theories from the industrial world in the area of academia and the theories about the West and the East within Chinese culture.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge on the economic performance of genetically modified (GM) cotton worldwide based on a wide range of data and source from available literature, and second to assess yield gain and economic performance.

A systematic review was captured to provide the evidence of potential benefits of GM cotton. A country-specific analysis was conducted in order to compare economic indicators and employed meta-analysis to find out the significance of the different of GM cotton over its counterpart.

This paper depicts positive impact of commercialized GM cotton in terms of net revenue, and the benefits, especially in terms of increased yields, are greatest for the mostly farmers in developing countries who have benefitted from the spill over of technology targeted at farmers in industrialized countries.

Due to the variability of the data which came from different methodologies, it is difficult to determine the differences of the performances each individual study.

This, it is believed that results from this study can be useful for operations of all sizes as the authors think about what needs to be focussed on for long-term producers survival.

The paper clearly indicates that China is the highest cotton yield of GM cotton, the lowest cost of GM seed and the lowest cost of chemical spray compare to any other countries. Therefore, this is the fact that the adoption of GM cotton has been widely spread among the farmers across the regions in China.

This paper aims to present a broad review of near-a titanium alloys for high-temperature applications.

Following a brief introduction of titanium (Ti) alloys, this paper considers the near-α group of Ti alloys, which are the most popular high-temperature Ti alloys developed for a high-temperature application, particularly in compressor disc and blades in aero-engines. The paper is relied on literature within the past decade to discuss phase stability and microstructural effect of alloying elements, plastic deformation and reinforcements used in the development of these alloys.

The near-a Ti alloys show high potential for high-temperature applications, and many researchers have explored the incorporation of TiC, TiB SiC, Y₂O₃, La₂O₃ and Al₂O₃ reinforcements for improved mechanical properties. Rolling, extrusion, forging and some severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques, as well as heat treatment methods, have also been explored extensively. There is, however, a paucity of information on SiC, Y₂O₃ and carbon nanotube reinforcements and their combinations for improved mechanical properties. Information on some SPD techniques such as cyclic extrusion compression, multiaxial compression/forging and repeated corrugation and straightening for this class of alloys is also limited.

This paper provides a topical, technical insight into developments in near-a Ti alloys using literature from within the past decade. It also outlines the future developments of this class of Ti alloys.

Innovativeness is crucial for industrial cluster firms to gain sustained competitive advantage. This study aims to investigate the effects of inter-firm coopetition on firm innovativeness within a cluster and examines the moderating role of institutional support.

This research adopts an empirical survey method using multi-source data from 181 industrial cluster firms. Regression is used to test the hypotheses of this study.

The results show that cooperation and constructive conflict promote firm innovativeness, while destructive conflict is detrimental to firm innovativeness. Moreover, the study also finds that cooperation interacts with both types of conflict to affect firm innovativeness, where cooperation and constructive conflict interact negatively on firm innovativeness, while cooperation and destructive conflict interact positively on firm innovativeness. In addition, institutional support weakens the effects of cooperation and destructive conflict on innovativeness, respectively, but has no significant moderating effect on the relationship between constructive conflict and innovativeness.

These findings enrich the current research on coopetition. The interaction effects of cooperation and both types of conflict on innovativeness deepen the concept of coopetition and responds to the call to further explore the interaction effects within coopetition. The moderating role of institutional support fills a gap in the empirical research on the role of institutional factors affecting coopetition on innovation and also provides valuable suggestions for firm managers and governments in industrial clusters.