Recently, Dr. Yang Jinyu, a young teacher of the School of Business made new progress in the field of management science and operational research. Based on the perspective of knowledge spillover, this study put forward the cooperative innovation decisions led by common suppliers in the supply chain, especially how suppliers design cooperative strategies to encourage downstream manufacturers to carry out innovation activities, which can be applied to the cooperative innovation decision making of supply chain enterprises. The related result was published in the European Journal of Operational Research titled How Can Suppliers Strategically Involve Downstream Manufacturers in Research and Development Collaboration? A Knowledge Spillover Perspective.

Currently, existing studies have shown that early engagement and cooperation of suppliers can offer external financial and knowledge resources brought for manufacturers' R&D innovation. However, few studies mentioned the incentives and motivations for suppliers to participate in manufacturers' R&D activities from the perspective of suppliers, especially when suppliers have got advanced technologies or high bargaining capacity due to their dominant position in the market. Suppliers must have strong motivation or incentive to participate in the innovation activities of manufacturers by sharing and utilizing expertise actively. To solve this problem, Dr. Yang Jinyu and his team focus on the competition and cooperation relations between a common supplier and two competitive manufacturers, and put forward three innovation models, including the non-cooperative innovation model, competitor cooperative innovation model and supply chain cooperative innovation model. The research results show that the cooperative innovation model of supply chain led by common suppliers can share R&D costs among supply chain participants, give full play to the role of knowledge spillover in the supply chain network, better promote the innovation activities of downstream manufacturers, and improve the performance of participating enterprises.

The first author of the paper is Dr. Jinyu Yang from the Department of Business Administration of the School of Business Guangxi University, with Associate Professor Zhang Wenqing from the University of Minnesota Duluth, and Professor Zhao Xiande from China Europe International Business School as the co-authors. The European Journal of Operational Research has an impact factor of 6.4 in 2022 and is listed in JCR/SCI District I and selected as one of the ABS/AJG four-star journals. The journal is committed to publishing high-quality original papers that contribute to Operational Research and decision-making, covering topics such as continuous optimization, discrete optimization, production, manufacturing and logistics, random statistics, decision support, computational intelligence, and information management.