MICE - The Cross-border Research Network on Marketing, Innovation and Chinese Economy

The MICE network is led by Professor Qing Wang. It explores key issues at the interface of marketing and innovation, in the context of fast growing economies like China. It engages academics, practitioners, and policy makers in the various activities from research idea gerneration, funding support to dissemination for research findings.

Technological innovations are an important source of growth for firms and economies worldwide. Firms at the leading edge of innovation tend to dominate world markets and promote the international competitiveness of their home country.

Fast growing economies like China and India have so far relied mostly on their cost advantages and abundance of natural and human resources, instead of sophisticated technological and marketing skills and capabilities. The latter has been the main weakness of these countries for historical reasons. Yet most existing studies on firm's innovation capabilities have been conducted in western firms, only a few studies have addresssed innovation capabilities of Chinese firms, and even fewer studies have linked technologicial capabilities to marketing capabilities of these firms. Against this background, the aim of the MICE network is to:

• raise awareness of the intersection of marketing and innovation as a significant area of research
• investigate the influence of contextual and country-level factors on this critical interfact in fast growing economies like China
• explore and establish key issues in this field through themed workshops and conferences
• engage practitioners and policy makers and seek funding from multiple national funding sources to conduct empirical and state-of-art research on these issues.