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The role of public R&d funding in innovation systems of east asian and ASEAN catch-up countries
... (R&D) for building technological capabilities that promote upward shift in the global value chain (Kroll & Schiller, 2013). However, technological change within the global value chain has reduced labour demand across all sectors in Asian developing economies (Bertulfo, Gentile, & de Vries, 2019). ...
Energy efficiency policy implemented within ASEAN-5 region raises concern over the possibility of compromising economic growth and trade in general, and labour market stability in specific. Previous studies have mostly considered the linear association and ignored nonlinearity between energy consumption and employment. Testing the existence of nonlinear energy-employment nexus for ASEAN-5 in 1991–2015, this paper shows an initially negative association between energy consumption and employment before turning positive beyond the energy and employment thresholds, portraying a U-shaped energy-employment nexus. Policies implementation may target on controlling energy increase beyond the employment threshold, and promoting employment creation beyond the energy threshold.
... The increasing variety of strategic models includes open innovation, learning organisations, and first-to-market competitive dynamics (Christopherson, Kitson, & Michie, 2008). This trend is salient in the types of knowledge and creative industries that have shaped postindustrial growth in Western cities and are now emerging in Asian cities (Arvidsson & Niessen, 2015;Fahmi, McCann, & Koster, 2017;Gwee, 2009;Irawati, 2013;Kroll & Schiller, 2013;Richardson, 2004;Teeple et al., 2014;Yigitcanlar & Sarimin, 2015). Whereas the "old" Asian-style developmentalism (Huff, 1995;Low, 2001) focused on physical infrastructure, capital-intensive production, corporate-state embeddedness, and industrial policy that anointed champion industries, a new generation of growth strategies is seeking to cultivate creative and knowledge industries in part through urban amenities and firm clustering, which are thought to lure creative professionals (Florida, 2003). ...
This article examines the impact of policies for start‐up and entrepreneurship on the developmental model that remains a policy legacy in many Asian countries. The main argument is that the influence of central planning is deeply embedded in the institutions of the Four Asian Tigers, but globalisation and economic liberalisation are disrupting the old developmentalism by incentivising innovation and structural adaptability. In practice, although developmentalism once focused on infrastructure and industrial policy, softer strategies such as attracting educated millennials through urban amenities and creative clustering mimic those of the postindustrial West. Either this trend represents the end of developmentalism or top‐down industrial policy is being rebranded to embrace knowledge and service industries. This article examines this issue at the urban scale, examining policies used by Singapore and Seoul to encourage start‐ups and entrepreneurship in the context of innovation. Government documents are examined and findings compared.
This study delves into the repercussions of startup and entrepreneurship policies on the established developmental strategies of Asian countries, with a specific emphasis on the Four Asian Tigers. Globalization and economic liberalization have triggered a significant shift in these nations, moving away from conventional infrastructure-focused approaches to adopting softer methods, such as enticing educated millennials with urbanised amenities and the hubs creative one's, reminiscent of Western societies. At the heart of this analysis lies a fundamental query: does this shift signify the demise of traditional developmentalism or indicate a progression towards amalgamating knowledge and service sectors within overarching industrial policies? To address this question, the research focuses intently on Singapore and Seoul, meticulously scrutinizing government documents to unravel the transformative processes unfolding at the urban level.
Recent research on science and technology parks (STPs) has called for including regional contextual factors in studies of STP performance. However, no study has yet systematically assessed how regional contextual factors support or hinder STP performance. We apply a systematic framework to a comparative case study of three regional STPs in Thailand and analyse the effects of varying conditions along five dimensions: urbanisation, industrial structure, regional institutions and culture, university and research institutes, and financial resources in relation to the performance of each STP. The three Thai regions are similar in both size and levels of urbanisation and are governed by the same national programme for STP development, which provides a good methodological set-up for analysing the effects of varying regional contexts. Findings reveal that positive STP development is grounded in the presence of an innovative culture in regions driven by an active collaboration among local actors. Moreover, despite STPs being located in the same national innovation system, different regional contextual factors result in different levels of STP performance. A holistic understanding of these regional connections can help improve designs of STPs, and other supportive policies that are important for regional innovation development.
Since political independence in 1965, Singapore has achieved remarkable economic growth through continuous industrial re-structuring and technological upgrading. This paper presents a framework suitable for analysing the national innovation system of small, late-industrialising economies, and applies it to examine how Singapore's national innovation system has transformed over the years, and how public S&T policy has changed in response to the changing needs of the innovation system. In particular, the paper highlights four generic stages in the evolution of Singapore's national innovation system, with the emphasis of public S&T policy shifting from assimilation and diffusion of technology through leveraging foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) to include an increasing focus on promoting indigenous R&D and technopreneurial start-ups in recent years. Implications from the analysis for Singapore's future public S&T policy challenges are discussed.
The success of East Asian firms in high technology industries, such as semiconductors and information technology products, is now an established fact. Against all the advantages of incumbents, these latecomer firms have found ways to insert themselves in worldwide production systems and to compete in advanced markets. But this very success poses a number of challenges for organisational and management theory. According to the conventional view, firms ground their success in R&D and innovation. When the firm wishes to expand abroad, it exports its technology. Yet it is clear that successful firms from East Asia have not built their competencies on conventional foundations through R&D, nor have they been recipients of technologies transferred by advanced firms for reasons to do with product cycles. On the contrary, the East Asian firms and agencies act as instigators of the processes of technology acquisition, acting in accordance with their own strategic impulses. Nevertheless a coherent and plausible account of East Asian success in knowledge intensive industries can be built on the basis of a ''competence'' or ''dynamic capabilities'' approach, where the focus is not on individual firms' own competence development, but on the processes of collective competence acquisition, through technology diffusion management, where firms and public agencies utilise various technology leverage devices. The goal of such an account is the construction of a ''mapping'' of the processes of diffusion, so that the degrees of leverage involved may be displayed, and the firms' own efforts to ''internalise'' the acquired capabilities may be captured. The paper presents a model of technology diffusion management, couched in terms of the strategic goals of the process, the pathways of diffusion, the dynamics of the process, and the institutional vehicles involved. The paper examines the limits to applicability of such an approach to industry creation, and the uptake of technology leverage processes in advanced environments, in conditions of rapid technological change, or ''hypercompetition''. The paper draws on these ideas to develop the notion of a ''national system of economic learning'' where the focus is on technology diffusion management, in contrast to the conventional notion of a ''national system of innovation.''
This article presents two models of research and technology organisations (RTOs) in latecomer countries undergoing technological catch-up. The RTOs in Model A tried to stimulate the accumulation of technological and innovative capabilities ‘within’ firms. In contrast, the RTOs in Model B attempted to create technological capabilities ‘on behalf of firms’. The models have produced different results. Case studies of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and Thailand’s National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) are used as representatives of the two models.
This article analyzes university–industry linkages (UILs) in Thailand at the national level and in four sectors (automotive, textiles–garments, agro-industry, and electronics). Public officials and firm managers recognize the importance of UILs for meeting challenges facing Thai producers. But with interesting exceptions, Thai UILs are frail. This is due to protection and low levels of innovation resulting in few private sector efforts to link up with universities; rigid structures and weak incentives in the Thai universities discouraging ties with business; and generally fragmented Thai bureaucracy. Underlying these obstacles is inconsistent support for UILs on the part of political leaders.
The role of universities in the technological upgrading of developing countries is attracting more and more interest from both the academic community and policy makers. This paper is proposing a new framework to understand this role by introducing the concept of academic capabilities. Its application is illustrated based on the case of Thailand. It is shown that the concept of academic capabilities allows interpreting higher education data and information in an innovative way. It can be applied to relate the multiple facets of universities (e.g. research, teaching, technology transfer, management) to the overall process of technological change and development.
China's technological capabilities are emerging rapidly. Some argue that the country will become a challenger to established technological leaders in the near future. Currently, however, there is contradictory evidence regarding China's potential for technological upgrading on a broader scale. By bringing together data on the public research system with evidence from the electronics industry in Guangdong province, this paper will show that many domestic firms continue to depend on foreign technology transfer whereas they have limited access to interest in domestic technologies. It is hence the purpose of this paper to illustrate the current mismatch between solutions supplied by the public sector and the true needs of Chinese firms. Its core argument is that technological development in China is not only suffering from a general lack of innovative capacity, as expectable at this stage of development, but also from an overt dependency on foreign technologies, that, if unaddressed, may impair its future potential for upgrading. We conclude that an increased provision of relevant solutions by domestic applied research institutes is possible in the mid-term but will depend on an improved management as well as on a new funding system that promotes the creation of customer relations with industrial firms. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This paper first presents five analytical frameworks-technology trajectory, absorptive capacity, technology transfer, crisis construction and dynamic learning process-that may be used to examine the process of technological learning at the firm level. These frameworks are interrelated to develop an integrative model. The Korean experience is then discussed as a case in point to illustrate how the frameworks can be used to analyze the process of building technological capability for industrialization. The paper also discusses many implications for public policy and corporate management in other countries. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.
This paper, using Thailand as a case study, aims at understanding the national innovation system (NIS) in developing countries which are less successful in technological catching-up. In contrast to developed countries, the development level of Thailand’s NIS does not link to its economic structural development level. As Thailand moves from agricultural to an increasingly industrial economy, its NIS remains weak and fragmented. The mismatch between the two affected Thailand’s competitiveness and partially contributed to the recent economic crisis. Studies of NIS in countries like Thailand should focus on factors contributing to the long-running perpetuation of weak and fragmented NIS.