Monday, June 24, 2013
KIBS in Russia
Marina
Doroshenko, Ian Miles, Dmitri Vinogradov, 2013
Knowledge Intensive Business Services as Generators of Innovations
Moscow,
Higher School of Economics, Working Papers no 12
At http://www.hse.ru/data/2013/06/20/1286847819/12STI2013.pdf
Knowledge
Intensive Business Services (KIBS) are widely argued to be important actors in
innovation systems. They are active both innovating themselves, and by
providing their clients with important knowledge and learning opportunities. This
study uses survey data to investigate the mechanisms of knowledge transfer and
innovativeness improvement through the provision of KIBS. The empirical core of
the paper is a set of Russian surveys of KIBS and their clients: KIBS are a
fairly new phenomenon in Russia, so this provides an opportunity to contrast
KIBS supplier-client relationships featuring more and less experienced customers.
Many of the KIBS firms’ services are highly tailored to customer specificities,
and we consider how far this is minor customisation and how far novel products (and
thus potentially product innovations) are involved. These services typically
involve KIBS consumers into a coproduction process, where both the formal
supplier and the formal user of the service are engaged together in service
production. Knowledge transfers through learning-by-doing in such cases affect
customers' propensity to innovate and improve their absorptive capacity. The
paper concludes that the generation of innovations through KIBS may well be a
self-sustaining process. In this process, service providers are incentivised to
engage in service innovations by more innovative customers’ demand for highly
individualised services. In turn, the process stimulates the innovativeness of
customers, as they engage in learning-by-doing through coproduction.
