Technological capabilities and industrial concentration in NICs and industrialized countries: Taiwanese SMEs versus South Korean chaebols

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management

Volumn 1, Issue 3-4, 2001, Pages 329-355

  Etemad, Hamid ^a   Lee, Yender ^b  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b NATIONAL TAIPEI UNIVERSITY OF BUSINESS   (Taiwan)

Author keywords

chaebols; newly industrialized countries (NICs); patent statistics; Small and medium enterprises (SMEs); South Korea; Taiwan; technological capabilities; technology concentration

Indexed keywords

EID: 3042563630     PISSN: 1368275X     EISSN: 17415098     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/ijeim.2001.000460     Document Type: Article

References (48)

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10. Most AICs have had a longer tradition of industrial development. In contrast, newly industrializing countries such as Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea have had agrarian economies prior to the Second World War. Yet they have achieved similar (or higher) levels of growth and development comparable to some AICs than in the last four decades. These intensified growth rates are making them much better candidates for studying technological capability, which is known to be cumulative over time.
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32. We acknowledge that it is a far stretch to use patent statistics as a proxy measure for technological capabilities as a whole; and an even further stretch for country capability. This, therefore, narrows the scope. The limited scope of this paper excludes, for example, organizational as well as managerial capabilities. For this very reason, IMD competitive indicators that incorporate such capabilities were included in the initial comparison in Table 1. From a long-term perspective, however, cumulative patenting activities must reflect the impact of all these capabilities. Patent–time series is therefore the most preferred single statistic over others capturing most, if not all, these effects.
33. The intermediating impact of conditions and circumstances which lead to, or are determinants of: (i) patenting, (ii) deployment of a patented invention, (iii) commercialization of the innovations, and (iv) accumulation of innovation toward technological capability are ignored by most scholars. Although beyond this study, we explicitly recognize that at least four sets of propensities are involved in the theoretical link between accumulation (over time) of technological capabilities and patents as a measure of inventions. These propensities are highlighted in the above model (Figure 1). In the absence of any contrary evidence, one must assume that each set has similar values for countries in this preliminary study.
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38. This topic is examined in more detail elsewhere [8, 42].
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43. ‘No assignee’ indicates that the assignee field of the patent was not filled in and was left blank at the time the patent application was submitted to the US Patent and Trademark Office and then published as such in the official Patent Gazette.
44. Etemad, H. and Lee, Y. (1998) ‘Technological specialization of Asian NICs countries’, Paper presented at the 1998 Atlantic Business Conference, Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Oct. 1998.
45. The ‘no assignee’ rate is bound to underestimate the true share of individual inventors and SMEs, because they may have simply assigned their invention to a firm, but it nevertheless provides a first estimate.
46. Inventions are usually assigned to the top 20 firms for purposes of deployment and commercialization, by other companies that are not in a position to push forward beyond inventing them (e.g., SMEs and individuals).
47. There is a difference in using a patent record on inventor or assignee basis. The former is an explicit measure of revealed inventive activities but does not necessarily point to all the efforts that transform the initial invention into a commercialized/used innovation. However, the latter is a much closer indication of at least the intention to commercialize, which is a better measure of incremental capabilities.
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