Innovation in Asian Industrialization: A Gerschenkronian Perspective

By M. Hobday. 2003

116 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper interprets the experience of the East and South East Asian electronics industry from a "Gerschenkronian" perspective in order to draw lessons for other developing countries. Following Gerschenkron, the paper argues that it is diversity, rather than unifor mity, in the institutional, technological and development policy arenas (called here "strategic innovation") that characterizes the experience of the Asian newly industrializing economies (NIEs). The experience of the leading export industry shows that the progress of the NIEs can be interpreted as a pattern of substitution of missing prerequisites, in line with Gerschenkron's view of European latecomer industrialization. More broadly, the progress of the NIEs should not be viewed as repetitions of earlier industrialization experiences as they involve significant deviations from the latter, usually entailing distinctive strategic innovations. This interpret ation presents a difficult challenge for those wishing to draw lessons from the Asian NIEs. There are few direct lessons from East and South East Asia for other countries and certainly no transferable or standardized "model" of development. Other paths and patterns of develop ment need to be identified and created that build upon the distinctive resources of individual developing countries. Strategic innovation, trial-and-error learning and variety are likely to continue to characterize successful industrial development in the future.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b57e041ab157a4aa50d71d66f3bb14b44744349

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Citations in the corpus

Upgrading the technological capabilities of foreign transnational subsidiaries in developing countries: The case of electronics in Thailand (2007, background): “Researchers in the field point out that there is nothing ‘automatic’ in these stages of development and that they are, at best, merely rough historical representations of general progress (Ernst et al. 1998; Hobday, 2003).”
From Global Value Chains (GVC) to Innovation Systems for Local Value Chains and Knowledge Creation (2017, unknown): “Works, such as Hobday (1994) and Kim (1997), have noted that the involvement of latecomer firms with the GVC in the form of OEM has led to an unprecedented export growth in the early catchup period in Korea and Taiwan. However, sustainability of the OEM strategy is questioned in Lee and Mathews (201”
R&D sourcing strategies: Determinants and consequences (2009, background): “As mentioned earlier, the majority of Taiwanese IT firms are SMEs, which undertake mostly OEM or ODM for TNCs (Ernst, 2000; Hobday, 2003; Lin, 2004).”
Innovation capability building and learning mechanisms in latecomer firms: recent empirical contributions and implications for research (2012, methodology): “In other words, this second kind of technology-related catch-up refers to progressive stages of technological innovations based, for instance, on the sequence of assembly to original equipment manufacture (OEM), own design manufacture (ODM), and own brand manufacture (OBM), as examined in studies ba”
High-Tech Exports from Developing Countries: A Symptom of Technology Spurts or Statistical Illusion? (2007, background): “As suggested in the literature, participation in electronics production networks requires learning and should be accompanied by technological upgrading in developing countries (Ernst 2001; Ernst and Kim 2002; Hobday 2003).”