• Energy Research

For an impoverished area to employ rural tourism (RT) as an avenue of poverty alleviation, there are two main challenges: building competitiveness with a very limited endowed resource base, and targeting the poor who generally lack financial capital or key capabilities as the main beneficiaries. With a case of Zhuanshui in China, an impoverished village without prominent tourism resource endowment, this paper has shown that the two challenges can be met through an innovation to construct a multi-industries integration network. This paper explores the development of the network, examines its characteristics, and analyzes its operation mechanisms. Results indicate that (1) the common objective of poverty alleviation and the same fundamental resource, combine RT and its extension industries tightly into an integration network; (2) sufficient evidence has been found for the embeddedness, endogeneity and empowerment of the network, but for empowerment, the poor’s participation is just the first stage to make appropriate decisions about the development due to their inadequate capabilities; and (3) vision developing, demonstration driving and centralized decentralization governance are three vital operational mechanisms to encourage the participation and collaboration of stakeholders. We also discussed the possible challenges for sustainability, being replicability of established competitive advantages, temporality of the major leader, and potential environmental degradation.

Although the evolutionary pathways are critical to the success of platforms, extant literature has provided little insight into the dynamic processes of the platform evolution, let alone how platforms constitute the evolutionary pathways over time. Against this backdrop, this study examines the evolutionary path constitution of platforms by adopting an organizational momentum lens. Through an exploratory case study of Pinduoduo, it provides evidence of path dependence under the network effects and of path creation resulting from the deliberate actions conducted by the platform firms. Moreover, this study identifies three platform strategies to manage its momentum to facilitate platform evolution and sustainability. Furthermore, this study develops a holistic framework to explain the interactions between platform momentum and path constitution by considering the outcomes of these strategies. The findings and developed framework shed novel light on the path constitution of platform evolution and provide new insight into the sustainability of the platform firms and platform-based markets by leveraging momentum thinking.

Innovation talents, as a most active and important resource in innovation activities, are receiving increasing attention in the enhancement of innovation capability. It seems that areas with strong innovation capability are more attractive to innovation talents. To explore the impact of innovation capability—measured by innovation environment input efficiency—on the distribution of innovation talent, and given the heavy-tailed distribution of talents, a quantile regression approach is adopted for Chinese data covering 2001–2015. The results show that: (a) at the country level, the innovation environment and innovation talents are surprisingly negatively related due to pre-reform special regional strategies and the immature innovation environment in China, while both innovation input and efficiency facilitates the agglomeration of innovation talent; and (b) at the regional level, some different influences on talents appear: the strongest negative impact of the innovation environment is in the areas with a low level of talents, moderate positive effects of innovation input and efficiency can be seen in areas with a medium level of talents, and significantly positive contributions from innovation input and efficiency can be seen in the areas that already have a high level of talents. The results offer some suggestions for managers and the government, which are beneficial for the guidance of the ordered flow of innovation talents and the enhancement of regional innovation capability and sustainability.