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.

Collaborative innovation within Platform-based Innovation Ecosystems (PIEs) relies upon the creation of effective partnerships between platform owners and complementors. Despite this, limited research examines the mechanisms that drive collaborative innovation performance within them. To address this important gap, this study performs a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) on 203 Chinese technological firms with the aim of uncovering the distinct configurations of relational elements that drive collaborative innovation within PIEs. The findings reveal three strategies that are equally effective at delivering collaborative innovation: (a) super-modular complementarity in relational operation dependence, (b) unique complementarity in relational operation dependence, and (c) coherence in relational norms dependence. Theoretically, the study contributes to literature on inter-organizational relationships in PIEs and collaborative innovation, by delineating essential relational structures and linking these relational elements to collaborative innovation performance. From a practical standpoint, both platform owners and complementors can use these findings to strengthen their collaborative innovation performance within PIEs.

Firm survival in dynamic software markets depends on collaboration with ecosystem complementors and exploitative and/or explorative innovation. Such activities have been widely accepted as crucial antecedents for collaboration success, but few studies have analyzed the configurational effects of collaborative modes effect on firm performance. Based on a sample of 224 software firms and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, results show that four causal configurations equivalently explain high innovation performance, in which exploitation, exploration, and collaboration with academic and governmental institutes are proven to be core causal conditions. Theoretically, this article contributes to the literature on collaborative innovation in terms of causality research and collaborative pathways but also enriches the literature on software ecosystems regarding partnerships and collaborative processes. Practical guidance and flexible choices for software firms to achieve high innovation performance are provided by offering four equivalent configurations.

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.

With the broadening application of the New Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), its role in patient satisfaction in rural China has shifted to be the focus of academic research. Based on a technology acceptance model, this study will investigate the factors and mechanisms influencing patient satisfaction on NCMSS in rural places in China. In this study, based on a technology acceptance model, we developed a model that is associated with the influencing factors, patients’ continued participation and patient satisfaction, and conducted an empirical analysis based on data collected from rural areas of China’s Anhui Province. A NCMS′s reputed reliability, value, and convenience played a key role in positively influencing patient satisfaction. However, long-term patient participation was not significantly influenced by other social factors. In order to increase patient satisfaction, NCMS policy and implementation procedure needs further government modification and innovation with the goal of improving the reimbursement ratio, reducing the financial burden, and improving patient convenience.

Purpose: Small- and-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) significantly contribute to the success of platform-based innovation ecosystems (PIEs). However, less is known about their behaviors and behavioral intentions (BIs) toward participating in PIEs. Considering that SMEs' BIs directly influence their behaviors and reveal the underlying logic of their behaviors, this study, therefore, focuses on SMEs' BIs and explores the antecedents to reveal the rational effects on BIs of the participation.Design/methodology/approach: An extended framework is proposed to understand SMEs' BIs toward the participation and empirically tested with data from a sample of 189 Chinese SMEs based on partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).Findings: The results show that (1) the framework has a good fit in the context of PIEs and a large predictability of SMEs' BIs toward the participation; (2) as expected, SMEs' BIs are directly positively affected by their attitudes (ATTs), subjective norms (SNs) and platform leaders (PLs), while indirectly positively influenced by perceived usefulness (PU) and ease and negatively influenced by perceived risks (PRs) via mediation effects and (3) surprisingly, BIs are directly negatively affected by platforms probably because of the potential collaborative risks based on platforms.Originality/value: This study enriches PIE literature by focusing on complementors and proposing a framework of SMEs' BI toward joining PIEs, and it also expands the application of BI–behavior theories in the context of PIEs by offering a BI–behavior perspective to analyze the rational logic of SMEs' behaviors of participating to PIEs. Practically, the main findings not only benefit SMEs to better understand their BIs and to make a wise choice toward the participation, but provide implications for PLs to proactively design interventions for attracting SMEs’ complementors.