Technology strategy, technological context and technological catch-up in emerging economies: industry-level findings from Chinese manufacturing

How Knowledge Acquisition Diversity Affects Innovation Performance during the Technological Catch-Up in Emerging Economies: A Moderated Inverse U-Shape Relationship

“…On the other hand, the studies have suggested that the larger the technology gap between foreign-owned enterprises and domestic enterprises, the lower the absorptive capacity of the latter [21,23]. Consistent with the absorptive capacity perspective, this underlines the significance of a small technology gap on innovation and R&D activities [41,48].…”

“…Finally, our findings provide novel insights for technology regime research, where scholars have found that technology regimes play a crucial role in the catch-up of domestic enterprises [22]. Most of the prior literature has mainly examined the conditions in terms of technological regime which enable domestic enterprises' catch-up to occur [12,20,22,41], or identified technology regime as the key contingency factor influencing the relationship between internal R&D and technological catch-up performance [23]. We add new insights to this line of research by integrating the research in both technology regime and external knowledge acquisition, indicating that technology regime (e.g., technology gap and technology development speed) can significantly influence the effect of external knowledge acquisition on innovation performance.…”

“…where the subscripts i denotes the i th manufacturing industry, and d and f represent domestic enterprises and foreign-invested enterprises, respectively. Technology development speed is proxied as the annual average growth rate for each industry-year as the percentage change in the amount of inventive patent applications from the previous year [23]. Patent application is usually regarded as a suitable indicator of technology or knowledge development output for both completely new products and existing but improved products in an industry [33].…”

“…Technology regime research at the industry level underlines the role of preexisting knowledge bases for successful catch-up of latecomers (referred to the domestic enterprises in developing countries) and suggests that the technological contexts with more knowledge stock will generate more technology opportunities [20,22]. Regarding the technological contexts of catching-up in emerging economies, technology development speed and the technology gap have long been recognized as fundamental features of technological contexts in prior work on technological regime, technological catching-up and innovation [20,23,24]. In this paper, the technology gap refers to the differences in the level of knowledge between foreign-owned enterprises and typically more lagged behind domestic enterprises at the industry level [21].…”

Economic development evaluation based on science and patents

“…Well-articulated information and communications infrastructures could generate a direct impact on domestic and global economic growth opportunities and have been shown to be an essential factor in reducing disparities between developed and developing economies [16]. There is a significant gap between the practice(s) of community-level socio-economic development and research into the adoption, use, and impacts of information technology [17].…”