The subject of this diploma thesis is proposal of measures that will lead to a real increase in the competitiveness of ZETOR TRACTORS a.s., the producer of tractors, engines and components of trademark Zetor. Based on internal and external analysis of the company are proposed measures, which should be subsequently applied to the development of company and thereby strengthening of its competitiveness on the global market.

This research study identifies the role of library and information centres at the major science and technology related universities and research institutes in the six GeC countries i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, in relation to the institutes/organisations research and development activities. It also had a comparative aspect in that it examined information resources and information services available in the institutes/organisations under study with users perceptions on the effectiveness and efficiency of library and information services. A survey research design utilizing questionnaires was chosen as the most appropriate and effective method for gathering the data needed with intensive interviews with academe, Deans/Directors of Library Information Centres and R&D personnel to answer the study's research questions. The different populations were queried including the Chief Executives of institutes/organisations, Deans/Directors of Library and Information Centres and selected R&D personnel associated with them. It was found that in spite of large library collections and a number of de-centralised library systems in all the universities, information services available to the R&D personnel were inadequate. The fmdings of this investigation provided the means for the development of the proposed regional and national library/information network systems for successful library and information services model presented in this study. As an alternative a GeC infonnation subsystem GCC-SIST has been recommended along with emphasis on an electronic information system.

This thesis maps factors, that are barrier to more significant cooperation between Czech universities and foreign venture capital funds. On one hand I examine the processes inside of venture capital fund, on the other hand I study the ways, in which is science supported in the Czech Republic, how centres for technology transfers are functioning and how motivated are scientists to patent their findings and start their own business. The result is evaluation of the factors that influence the decision on the investor, who is contemplating investment either in the Czech Republic or USA.

The diploma thesis focuses on the impact of innovative activities for foreign trade of ŽĎAS, a.s.. The theoretical part defines terms in innovation, research, development and foreign trade. The practical part specifies the technical innovations of the company and their impacts on foreign trade. The dependence of research and development expenditure incurred with sales from selling their own products abroad, ROA, ROE, ROS and with quality of production. The dependence of sales from foreign trade to enterprise on the number of employees of the company are measured. At the end of the work, the results and proposed recommendations for the development of the company are evaluated.

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The organizing theme of this dissertation is media and ownership. The first and second chapters explore how media content is influenced by its ownership, using commercial media outlets in the U.S. and government-owned media in China respectively. The third chapter studies how Research and Development efficiency differs across listed firms of various ownership structures. In the first chapter, I explore what determines the media slant towards foreign nations using the 2018-2019 Sino-U.S. trade negotiation as a testing ground. Using an event study design and coverage by local U.S. newspapers, I analyze how stories about China respond to shifts in U.S. policy towards China, and how this media reaction is determined by owners' partisan affinity, controlling for readers' characteristics. I find that local newspapers with Republican-leaning owners increase the intensity of negative coverage following a shift towards hostile trade policies relative to papers of nonpartisan owners, and they decrease this slant following a conciliatory shift; the opposite is true for Democratic-leaning media owners. To address the potential endogeneity of diplomatic events, I select events that induced significant abnormal price fluctuations of trade-war-related financial securities. I further establish a causal effect of owners' preferences by exploiting mergers and acquisitions among national conglomerates as a source of variation in the political orientation of owners. These findings imply a spillover from the domestic policy in forming citizens' sentiment towards other nations: the media, as their lens to view the world, is colored by domestic political polarization. In the second chapter, I study how political competition among provincial officials affects media criticism in China. I collect news reports of local mouthpiece outlets operated by local provincial governments that at least point out the weakness of local governance from 2004 to 2017. By exploiting the semi-randomness of the pairing of the provincial governor and the party sectary, based on an established fact that bureaucrats are likely to be promoted in their third or fourth year (hereafter referred to as the examination period), I show with a DID setting that competition induces media criticism. Specifically, compared with pairs without an overlapped examination period, pairs assigned with an overlapped period 1) observe higher criticism, especially on economic improvement, during the secretary's examination period; 2) show better joint economic performance; 3) demonstrate a positive correlation between media criticism and secretaries' promotion, especially when the GDP growth rate is mediocre. The intuition can be illustrated by a principal-agent model with adverse selection. When individual signals are not observed, the secretary sends a media signal to take more credit for the joint performance. In the third chapter, we empirically investigate how state-owned firms differ from non-state-owned firms in their R&D efficiency. We estimate the economic value of invention patents granted to Chinese publicly listed firms using the stock market's responses to patent issuances, following the methodology proposed in Kogan, Papanikolaou, Seru, and Stoffman (2017). We measure the return of R&D by dividing the future patent value by current R&D expenditure, and find that the state-owned firms' R&D efficiency is higher with very low R&D intensity, and is lower for medium and high R&D intensity. This finding is robust across different specifications, with both non-parametric and parametric models.

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This dissertation consists of three linked articles on the allocation of R&D resources in the economy and its impact on innovation and economic growth. First, I document large and persistent differences in firm-level R&D returns, which is sur- prising as traditional growth models with frictions and competitive markets for R&D inputs predict that R&D resources flow from low to high R&D return firms until they are equalized. I show that differences in firms’ labor market power over inventors can explain R&D return differences and provide evidence in favor of this hypothesis. Finally, using an endogenous growth model I estimate that such differences are quantitatively important for R&D returns dispersion and that economic growth would be significantly faster without this friction. Second, I pursue a summary statistic approach to determining the allocative efficiency of R&D resources in the US. Empirically, I find that allocative efficiency has declined over time with potentially large negative consequences for US economic growth. Finally, I investigate the empirical contribution of workforce aging in the US to the slowdown in economic growth. My evidence suggests that workforce aging leads to slower economic growth, partly due to lower demand for new technologies.

Yes / Drawing on collective contributions and group performance perspectives, this paper examines the role of board diversity in firms’ R&D investment decisions. Building on a fault-line argument about a team’s demographic attributes, this study also decomposes the impact of demographic and cognitive diversity on R&D spending. The study sample contains UK data of non-financial companies covering the period between 2005 and 2018. We employ panel data analysis techniques and control for potential endogeneity issues through the application of the two-step system Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) estimations. The findings demonstrate a positive and significant relationship between board diversity and level of corporate R&D spending. The findings also show cognitive diversity as significantly positively associated with corporate R&D investments. Demographic diversity, however, has an insignificant relationship with corporate spending on R&D. The results further show that demographic diversity negatively moderates the relationship between cognitive diversity and spending on R&D. Our main findings document that the board’s attributes as a group significantly influence decisions of strategic importance such as, investment in R&D projects. The findings on sub-dimensions of board diversity imply that as compared to demographic diversity, functional/cognitive diversity is more relevant to strategic decisions and related outcomes. The study has practical implications for shareholders in documenting the importance of board diversity, and policy implications for regulators in highlighting the separate roles of behavioural and cognitive diversity in shaping firms’ strategic investment decisions.

This dissertation attempts to contribute to our understanding of how firms can manage and benefit from its research and development (R&D) communities. In the first essay, we examine how established firms can leverage a broad R&D community to invent successfully during the early stage of a technological change. We find significant inventions by incumbents outside the existing dominant designs and relate their success to their willingness to search novel areas, explore scientific knowledge in the public domain, and form alliances with a balanced portfolio of partners. We find support for the hypotheses using data from the global semiconductor industry between 1989 and 2002. In the second essay, we examine a classical choice within an R&D community: cooperation or competition with other firms along a technology supply chain. We find that the answer depends not just on the transaction costs, strength of intellectual property protection rights, and asset cospecialization in the buyers' industries, but also the supplier's knowledge transfer capability and a typical buyer's productivity in developing licensed inventions. For instance, the effect of asset cospecialization on licensing is moderated by the factors that affect the buyers' productivity in developing external technology. Additionally, factors that reduce the buyers' development productivity can be mitigated by the supplier's knowledge transfer capability. We find empirical supports for these predictions using a cross-industry panel dataset of a sample of 345 U.S. small technology-based firms for the 1996-2007 period. In the third essay, I develop two game theoretical models to address how research competition from academic researchers affects firms' openness in disclosing intermediate R&D outcomes. Both models predict that such competition increases the firm's incentive to publish research findings, even though the firm would not have had such an incentive without the presence of the competition. The models also suggest several conditions under which the effect takes place. I further discuss the implications of ownership fragmentation for research materials within the scientific community and academic researchers' engagement in entrepreneurial activities. As implied by my models, these phenomena might instigate withholding of research findings by firms.