دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله مروری بر انتقال فناوری بین المللی (نشریه الزویر 1990)

مروری بر انتقال فناوری بین المللی

International technology transfer: A review

This paper reviews the international technology transfer literature. We propose and use an organizing framework in line with key elements of international technology transfer; home country, host country and transaction component. Based on our review, we identify the key issues that merit further exploration.

1 Introduction

International technology transfer (ITT) as a subject of study has accumulated a vast body of research over the past twenty-five years. Given the inherent complexity of the subject, findings, conclusions and contentions of what we know about ITT are fragmented along various specialities. The work of Contractor and Sagafi-Nejad [47] represents one of the few attempts to pull this literature together into a systematic whole. We complement the above-noted work and attempt a comprehensive review of the work on ITT.

Any attempt at consolidation and review is only as successful as the organizing structure that permits synthesis of what we know and delineation of what else we need to know to paint a more complete picture. Prior efforts to impose a framework for the study of ITT have emphasized three distinct aspects: international political dimensions, commercial transactions, and issues of operational relevance. The international political framework concentrates attention at the level of the nation state and evaluates issues related to cooperation and confrontation between the transfer countries [160,1993. The commercial framework, on the other hand, by emphas~ng firm-level activity, seeks to determine the outcome of individual projects as the interplay of corporate motives and negotiating strategies [2,178]. Predominant focus on the host country characterizes the operational framework. The primary intent here is evaluation of the preferred technology’s contribution to the recipient country’s social and economic development [3,123]. These frameworks, while clearly useful, fail to acknowledge fully the fact that ITT has a horizontal and a vertical component, each with its own constituent elements. On the horizontal dimension, the three base elements in ITT are a home country, a host country, and a transaction (the home country is where the technology originates; the host country denotes the recipient). The vertical aspect acknowledges that within the home and host countries, analyses and issues arise that are specific to the nation state, an industry or a firm. The implications of technology transfer can rarely be isolated to any one specific level given the interdependence in this system.

Our review therefore, uses the home-transaction-host classification to organize the literature. In so doing we isolate the specific issues of relevance under each category and the findings, to date. Table 1 presents our organizing framework and is keyed to each section in the paper. Although a comprehensive review is our objective, in the interest of parsimony (the length of the paper might dispute our intention), we have chosen to drop those citations whose findings/arguments are well covered in the material that we present.