SERIES ON INNOVATION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT FOR CHINESE ENTERPRISES – serie

China has attracted a huge amount of investment in R&D internationalization of multi-national corporations (MNCs), which is playing an important role in its economy. Constrained by natural resources, China has to attach more importance to technological progress and indigenous innovation in order to move beyond the old economic growth model. Technology seems inaccessible to outsiders, which prevents others from doing research in a comprehensive and systematic manner. In this book, technology is regarded as a factor of production that is allocated by MNCs across the world to maximize profits. Such rational economic behavior serves as our entry point to enhance existing theoretical achievements on R&D internationalization.

This book is the research report of the "Construction of Theory and Formation Mechanism of Total Innovation Management (TIM)" (Program No. 70372018), a program funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. This program aims to discuss and analyze, under the general trend of indigenous innovation, how enterprises construct indigenous innovation capability through total innovation management and to offer enterprises theoretical foundations and practical guidance to develop themselves towards indigenous innovation.The research results are not only the results of a three-year long research but also the reflection of the accumulated experiences of our research center in the field of technology innovation for nearly 40 years. In the field of technology innovation, we have experienced three distinct phases, namely: secondary innovation, portfolio innovation and total innovation.Total innovation is the main characteristic of an innovation-based enterprise. Creating an innovation-oriented enterprise by constructing a total innovation system is the approach that successful foreign enterprises use to move towards excellence and also the only way that Chinese enterprises have to take to become innovation-oriented enterprises that leapfrog in development.

This book provides a novel theoretical framework to explain the real source of competitive advantage of Chinese manufacturing. More importantly, such a framework can be generalized to analyze the potential of catch-up for large emerging economies in the globalization era. The book also provides insights for policy makers to rethink their design of policies.The rise of Made-in-China products has been widely attributed to low labour cost advantage and imitation advantage. However, as these two advantages are nearly innate to all late-developing countries, they cannot be regarded as the key factors that drive the rapid growth of China's manufacturing industry, or China's economy, over the past few decades. In this book, the author proposed a theory — "the catch-up ladders theory", to explain the rise of China's manufacturing industry. The manufacturing advancement of any country is in essence a process of catching-up in both market and technology, during which enterprises will form a ladder-like holistic structure due to their differences in capabilities, technology and market positioning. In light of this, the continuity of the catch-up ladder will greatly determine the catch-up efficiency of an industry and even a country at large. Such a perspective is more applicable to large emerging economies, especially those with over one hundred million population and thus huge potential domestic market demand.

Based on a new perspective, this book explores the theory of internationalization of technological innovation in four aspects, namely strategy, organization, resource allocation and environment, and analyzes the development rules and key points of management in the internationalization of technological innovation for Chinese firms. On the basis of theoretical and empirical studies, this book proposes an evolutionary model of the internationalization of technological innovation. It is hoped that the proposed model will be of value to the advancement of the internationalization of technological innovation for the Chinese firms and will contribute to the enrichment and improvement of the theories in technological innovation.

Using a combination of theoretical analysis and case studies, this book analyses the theoretical issues — concept and type of independent innovation, and the practical issues — construction of institutional system which is in favor of independent innovation. It is written for researchers who are engaged in similar fields and readers who are interested in independent innovation. In this book, a comparison of the independent innovation modes of China, Japan and South Korea is presented. The ability, mode and track are defined clearly. The efficient path of Chinese independent innovation is put forward through case studies.

In the past 30 years or so, reform and opening-up are the two major themes for China's economic and social development. Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has made great explorations in the depth and breadth of opening-up. This book provides a comprehensive overview of some issues and policies of mutual benefit and win-win strategies, which include China's foreign trade and technical barriers to trade, China's technology progress, China's service outsourcing industry, China's direct investment and RMB internationalization. It is an important reference book for Chinese policy-makers, Chinese businessmen and foreigners.

Chinese enterprises have relied on importing technology and imitation as their main technology strategies in the past. Based on analysis of cross-countries' case studies and the history of industrial innovation, the authors proposed the concept of industry-driven basic research and expounds the important role of scientific discovery in industrial technological innovation. They are convinced that both the government and enterprises should focus on industry-driven basic research in order to bridge the gap between the government's target and what enterprises actually do in China. The challenge remains to be seen if China can transform Science and technology investment into real industrial innovation capability.