Imitation to Innovation: Late Movers’ Catch-up Strategy and Technological Leadership Change

Laggards imitate, leaders innovate: the heterogeneous productivity effect of imitation versus innovation

“…How imitation, innovation, and productivity are related is discussed mainly on a theoretical level. Most previous works are formal models (Aghion et al, 2001;Vandenbussche et al, 2006;Benhabib et al, 2014;Chang et al, 2015, König et al, 2016. Empirical studies are few and mainly limited to country-level analysis (Vandenbussche et al, 2006;Madsen et al, 2010) and case studies of firms in certain industries, such as the telecommunications industry (Lee and Lim, 2001;Guo et al, 2015), the electronics industry (Hobday, 1995;Kim, 1997;Lee and Lim, 2001), and the automobile industry (Lee and Lim, 2001).…”

“…Agénor and Dinh (2013) develop a formal model showing that, through reverse engineering and learning by doing, unskilled laborers in the imitation sectors become familiar with technology and gain cognitive skills that favor innovation. Chang et al (2015) use a computational model to simulate the catch-up process.…”