Does the Multiple-Participant Innovation Improve Regional Innovation Efficiency? A Study of China’s Regional Innovation Systems
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I read the paper with great interest. The topic is very interesting. But my concern is that the authors have not defined the concepts. It appears that the authors have simplified the complex issues in a way that everything is very rosy. In terms of methodlogy, I wonder if using a variable for each bond can cover the complex reality.
Maybe the following papers help the authors improve their work:
Tajeddini, K., and Trueman, M.,. 2016. Environment-Strategy and Alignment in a Restricted, Transitional Economy: Empirical Research on its Application to Iranian State-Owned Enterprises. Long Range Planning, 49(5): 570-583.
Tajeddini, K. 2016. Financial Orientation, Product Innovation and Firm Performance: An Empirical Study in the Japanese SMEs. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 35(2): 1-23.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments, the authors applied different variables to measure different bonds, most of the variables are supported by different empirical studies. The authors would add some additional discussions about variable design to make it reasonable. The two articles from top-Journal benefit us a lot in terms of research design and measurement of innovation, we cited the two articles to make our manuscript more convincing.
Moreover, we also check the language style and spelling to meet the standard of Sustainability. After all, thank you for your comments and we will take them into consideration. Best regard!
Reviewer 2 Report
I do not see any week points of this article. It can be published with no changes.
Author Response
Thank you for your comment, we will do more further research on the regional multiple-participants' innovation.
Reviewer 3 Report
This paper aims at exploring the relationship between regional radical innovation efficiency and degree of multi-participants’ collaboration leveraging a Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.
This topic is interesting and fits well the main goal \ topics of the journal.
However, the presentation of the article should be improved.
Indeed, many sentences are unclear and this precludes the reader an easy understanding of the relevant parts of the proposed approach.
For this reason, I recommend in particular to the authors a significant revision of the text in English.
The title of the article is also unclear and it should be better formulated.
Moreover, in order to show its contribution more clearly, the authors should analyze the current state of the art, providing in particular a comparison to other existing approaches published in literature, and explaining better the advantages of the proposal.
In addition, since the whole approach has not been properly validated and the correctness of the obtained results has not been completely demonstrated, the authors should articulate and better explain how they arrived at the numbers presented in Tables 2,3, 5, and 5.
The authors should also better explain the expressions used to calculate Consistency and coverage mentioned at pag. 6 row 345-250 (What do x and y represent?) and why they decided to adopt these two measures as indicators.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments and we appreciate them very much.
Point 1: the presentation of the article should be improved(layout and English).
Response 1: The authors adapt the presentation and apply the English editing service and layout editing from MDPI‘s author service.
Point 2: Title of the article should be better formulated.
Response 2: The title is revised by the authors, the new title is "Does the Multiple-Participant Innovation Improve Regional Innovation Efficiency? A study of China's Regional Innovation Systems"
Point 3： The literature review of previous works and comparison.
Response 3: The authors adds more recent works and make a comparison in the section of variable design. In this way, the variable design is guided by previous studies.
Point 4: The authors should explain how the results are arrived in table 2,3,and 5.
Response 4: The authors give a detailed explanation of the results demonstrated in table2-5. Table 2 is single bond's effect on regional innovation efficiency; Table 3 is truth-table algorithm which indicates all the configurations of bonds' consistency to the regional innovation efficiency. Table 4 is the solution analysis which is calculated from truth-table algorithm(also explained in the article). Table 5 is the robustness check from hierarchical regression.
Point 5: The authors should explain the consistency and coverage in line245-250.
Response 5: The authors give a further explanation about consistency and coverage. In fs-QCA, X is the casual configurations of bonds (like independent variable in quantitative study), Y is the outcome variable(like dependent variable); consistency is the degree of how X would be the solution of Y（like goodness of fit in quantitative study); coverage stands for how the configurations could be the exclusive solution to the outcome variable.
After all, thank you for your comments which benefit us a lot!
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for improving the paper.
Author Response
Thank you do much for all your works on reviewing, we appreciate them. Best wishes!
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed all the previous reviewer comments and the manuscript has been greatly improved.
In order the enhance the quality of the article, the following issues should be addressed:
-) Under the subsection 2.3.2, the following sentence
" the collaboration with university would also save the expenditure cost, with the diffusion of the value chain and waves of industrial diversity, and some large companies also coordinated with famous universities to improve their R&D performance"
could be enforced by citing, after the sentence, the following article:
Caldarola, E. G., Modoni, G. E., & Sacco, M. (2018). ManuLearning: A Knowledge-Based System to Enable the Continuous Training of Workers in the Manufacturing Field. International Association for Development of the Information Society.
In particular, the above article reports a process of knowledge transfer based on a two-way channel, which includes Factory-to-Classroom and Academia-to-industry communication paths.
-) Under the section 3.1, the definition of consistency and coverage have been improved but some things are still not clear.
For example, the authors should better explain the meaning of X and Y. Specifically, what do the authors mean by "casual configuration" and by "outcome variable"?
What do the authors mean by "consistency is the degree of how X would be the solution of Y"?
-) In addition, the authors should articulate and better explain how they arrived at the numbers presented in Tables 2 (also in the cases of absence of a variable).
Author Response
Thank you for your comments, we appreciate them so much. We trust with the guidance of these advices our article would be better.
Point 1: lack of citation in the section 2.3.2.
Response 1: The authors downloaded the article on the digital library from International Association of Development of Information Society. This article demonstrates the dynamic connection between academic and industry. In this way the authors cited it in this paper.
Point 2: To define the casual configurations, outcome variable in section 3.1 and why the authors stated consistency is the degree of X would be the solution of Y?
Response 2: The authors added some detailed introduction of, X,Y and consistency . Y is the outcome variable which is regional innovation efficiency in this paper, X is the casual configuration which is the combinations of different bonds, there is 5 bonds in the research , so there should have 32 different configurations. If a configuration has tight relationship with innovation efficiency, this configuration would have a high consistency.
Point 3: The result in Table 2 should be better explained.
Response 3: The authors gave some extra introduction of the how the result came out and list a example. For example, result in bond 1 is the single bond's consistency to the innovation efficiency while "~bond1" is the consistency come from the other four bonds exclude bond 1.
