Independent or Interdependent Innovation: The Case of Huawei
Prior studies viewed interdependence as an important mechanism for coordinative innovation and examined its impacts on innovations. However, it is still not clear that how latecomer firms with limited innovation capabilities can strategically manage inter
- PDF / 340,521 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 419.528 x 595.276 pts Page_size
- 119 Downloads / 256 Views
Introduction
Despite pressure from innovation competitions, Chinese firms have gained benefits from national policies which expose them with tremendous opportunities to access, absorb, and develop their own innovation capabilities. For example, the “opening-door” policy since 1978 attracted a large number of foreign invested enterprises that have been oriented by the Chinese government to transfer technologies to Chinese domestic firms (Buckley et al. 2007b). It also intensified competitions faced by these Chinese firms, as they are usually latecomers. Since 2001, the “go- global” national policy has encouraged both state-owned and privately owned firms to invest abroad for seeking various strategic assets that are
X. Liang (*) Peking University, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] Y. Xu Cardiff Business School, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 W. Zhang et al. (eds.), Huawei Goes Global, Palgrave Studies of Internationalization in Emerging Markets, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47564-2_12
265
266
X. Liang and Y. Xu
not available in domestic markets (Anderson et al. 2015; Cui et al. 2017). Consequently, Chinese firms become more integrated and inter- connected with established multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the global arena for advancing innovation capabilities (Buckley et al. 2019). Prior studies on innovation management paid attention to the concept of interdependence (Adner and Kapoor 2010; Fredrich et al. 2019; Frenz 2005; Fuentelsaz et al. 2016). Since coordination becomes increasingly important in innovation, these studies viewed interdependence as an important mechanism in achieving innovation through coordination and examined its impacts on innovations at various levels, such as individual, group, organization, and innovation systems. However, it is still not clear that how latecomer firms, such as those from emerging markets (EMs), with limited innovation capabilities could strategically manage interdependence in order to catch up in such an environment. This motivated us to question: How can latecomer firms manage interdependence in order to catch up with innovations? The question is raised with important implications for firms from EMs. Taking China as an example, in order to react to the intensified international competition and support the endogenous growth of the national economy, the Chinese government has been long promoting the “independent innovation” policy. With this policy, Chinese MNEs are encouraged to become “independent”, in the sense that they can develop enabling technologies and original innovations by themselves and rely less on foreign firms (Huang et al. 2017; Huang et al. 2013). Meanwhile, in order to make Chinese firms more global, Chinese firms were also encouraged to be integrated into global value chains (Buckley et al. 2019; Buckley and Hashai 2014), thus, inevitably becoming more interdependent with foreign players. It brings a dilemma for Chinese firms as these latecomer firms need to become independent as well as interdependent
Data Loading...
