دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله ایجاد برتری تکنولوژیکی (نشریه تیلور و فرانسیس 2011)

ایجاد برتری تکنولوژیکی: فرصت ها و محدودیت ها

Making a Technological Catch-up: Barriers and Opportunities

Abstract

This paper has discussed several issues regarding the barriers and opportunities for technological catch‐up by the late‐comer countries and firms. As one of the barriers to technological catch‐up, the paper emphasizes the uncertainty involved with the third stage of learning how to design. The barriers arise because as the forerunner firms refuse to sell or give license to successful catching‐up firms who thus have to design the product by themselves. The paper discusses how to overcome this barrier. It also notes that if the crisis of design technology is a push factor for leapfrogging, arrival of new techno‐economic paradigm can serve as a pull factor for leapfrogging, serving as a winder of opportunity. The, it emphasized the two risks with leapfrogging, namely the risk of choosing right technology or standards and the risk of creating initial markets, and how to overcome these risks. It discusses how to overcome these risks in leapfrogging, and differentiates diverse forms of knowledge accesses.

Then, the paper takes up the issue of whether there can be a single common or several models for catch‐up. A common element of catching‐up is to enter new markets segments quickly, to manufacture with high levels of engineering excellence, and to be first‐to‐market by means of the best integrative designs. This observation is supported by the fact that Korea and Taiwan has achieved higher levels of technological capabilities in such sectors as featured by short cycle time of technology. The possibility of two alternative models for catch‐up is also discussed in terms of the key difference between Korean and Taiwan, especially in the position toward the source of foreign knowledge and the paths taken toward the final goal of OBM. Taiwan followed the sequential steps of OEM, ODM and OBN, in collaboration or integration with the MNCs. Korean chaebols jumped from OEM directly to OBM even without consolidating design technology.

1 Introduction

While many appreciated the rapid economic growth achieved by the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) (Amsden, 1989; Chang, 1994; World Bank, 1993), more recent concern has been why such catch-up is not happening in other parts of the world. Despite huge amount of development aid and the accompanied policy changes, poverty and the gap between the rich and poor countries still prevails.

Argument has been made that even good policy prescriptions fail because of poor institutional conditions, such as insecure property right and rule of law and so on. Thus, the recent literature in economic development has debated on the relative importance among institutions, policy and geography as competing determinants of economic growth, with more research appearing in favor of the first factor, institution (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson, 2001; Rodrik, et al., 2004). Much missing in the debate on the determinant of economic development is the role of technology. Technological innovation is recognized as one of the most serious bottleneck in many countries, especially in middle income countries in Latin America. Furthermore, it is apparent that a stable macro-environment, secure property rights, adequate infrastructure, or liberal trade policy is not sufficient to trigger sustained growth.2) While it still remains to be seen whether we should treat technology as a part of institutions or policy, there is also some shift in the technology-oriented views on economic growth.

The attention to the latecomers in economic development goes back to Gerschenkron (1962, 1963) that emphasized the advantages of the late comers, such as economy of scale in plant sizes in steel, owing to the fact that these countries started to use the technology only after it become matured enough to have the capital goods suitable for efficient production. However, the majority of the early literature have focused on explaining how developing countries including the NIEs have tried to catch up with advanced countries by assimilating and adapting the more or less obsolete technology of the advanced countries, which is consistent with the so-called product life cycle theory (Vernon, 1966; Utterback and Abernathy, 1975; L. Kim, 1980, 1997; OECD 1992; Dahlman Westphal, and Kim, 1985). In this view, catching-up is considered as a question of relative speed in a race along a fixed track, and technology is understood as a cumulative unidirectional process (Perez, 1988). However, the speed of progress on the track has been uneven, with some catching-up rapidly and others lagging behind.

Regarding the sources of the uneven progress, one stream of research focuses on knowledge gap between the rich and the poor or the catcher and the laggard, and the issue of how to imitate, learn and create new knowledge in the latecomer country (Amsden, 1989, Amsden and Chu, 2003; Ernst and, Kim 2002; Ernst, 2002; Mathews, 2001; Yusuf, 2003). Applying the idea of knowledge creation and the concept of GPN (global production network) Ernst and Kim (2002) discusses how the late-comer firms learn the existing knowledge and create new knowledge. Mathews (2002; 2003) takes the resource-based view of the firm (Penrose, 1959) to analyze learning and competitive advantages of the late-comer firms.