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.

Purpose: Knowledge sharing (KS) among employees is critical to successfully developing complex products and systems (CoPS) but is often hampered by employees’ low motivations. The purpose of this study is to investigate how extrinsic and intrinsic rewards influence employees’ explicit knowledge sharing (EKS) and tacit knowledge sharing (TKS) in the CoPS development context. This study also examines the moderating effects of transformational leadership on the relationships between two types of rewards and two types of KS. Design/methodology/approach: This study builds a research model based on expectancy value theory and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To test hypotheses, the authors surveyed 257 employees in CoPS projects and analyzed data with the partial least squares structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling. Findings: The results of this study demonstrate that extrinsic rewards exert no effect on EKS but negatively affect TKS, while intrinsic rewards significantly promote both EKS and TKS. Moreover, transformational leadership positively moderates the abovementioned relationships. Originality/value: This study extends the research scenario of KS motivations and responds to the call for shedding light on contextual factors influencing KS. This study also offers a comprehensive theoretical perspective to understand KS motivations. Practically, this study provides managers with suggestions about how to use different rewards to encourage different KS practices.

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.