- Email: [email protected]
Theory and empirical evidence of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership
G Model RESPOL-3336; No. of Pages 1
ARTICLE IN PRESS Research Policy xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Research Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/respol
Editorial
Theory and empirical evidence of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership
Many industries witness more than once a change in industrial leadership and successive catch-up by late entrants. The incumbent fails to maintain its superiority in terms of production or market share, and a latecomer catches up with the incumbent. Subsequently, the latecomer, having gained the leadership, loses it to another latecomer. We describe this phenomenon of successive changes in industrial leadership in terms of “catch-up cycles”, where catch-up means a substantial closing of the gap in market share between firms in the leading country and firms in the latecomer or follower country. This Special Issue attempts to explain these phenomena with two conceptual and modelling papers (Lee and Malerba, 2016; Landini, Lee and Malerba, 2016) and a number of sectoral studies: on mobile phones (Giachetti and Marchi, 2016), semiconductor memory chips (Shin, 2015), cameras (Kang and Song, 2016), steel (Lee and Ki, 2016), mid-sized jets (Vértesy, 2016), and wine (Morrison and Rabellotti, 2016). In most of the sectors examined, the leadership moves to Asian countries: only for mid-size aircraft and wine does the leadership change in favour of Latin America and Europe. In addition, the analysis of the wine sector allows us to shed some light on the dynamics of natural resource-based sectors. The framework for the theoretical and empirical analysis is based on the notion of sectoral systems. During their evolution, certain discontinuities may take place: we call these “windows of opportunity”. The concept of windows of opportunity was first used by Perez and Soete (1988) to refer to the role of new technoeconomic paradigms in generating leapfrogging by latecomers who take advantage of a new paradigm and overtake the existing incumbents. The Special Issue broadens the notion of windows of opportunity by linking them to the building blocks of a sectoral system. It identifies three types of windows – technological, demand and institutional. Together with the notion of “windows of opportunity”, the Special Issue uses the concept of “response” by firms and systems. Some firms from emerging countries and other components of the sectoral system may respond successfully to the opening of windows and therefore rise to a position of global leadership, whereas falling behind the current leaders may be due to a lack of effectiveness in the response. In short, the thrust of the view proposed in this Special Issue is that diverse combinations
of windows of opportunity and the responses by firms and other components of the sectoral systems of latecomers and incumbents determine which pattern of successive catch-ups is most likely to emerge in a sector. Methodologically, most of the papers in this Special Issue are in the spirit of ‘appreciative theorizing’ (Nelson and Winter, 1982) and aim to provide ‘causal explanations of observed patterns’ of leadership changes across sectors. The development of this Special Issue was supported by a joint research program between Bocconi University and Seoul National University, under the framework of an international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (2012K2A1A2031787) and the Catch-up Program coordinated by Richard Nelson. Previous versions of the papers making up this Special Issue were presented and discussed at the Bocconi University Milan Workshop (2012), the Seoul Workshop (2013), and the 2013 Globelics Conference. We wish to thank Richard Nelson, the discussants at the Workshops and the referees of this journal for their very useful comments. Professor Keun Lee Economics Department, Seoul National University, Gwanak-ro 1, Seoul, 151-746, South Korea Professor Franco Malerba a,b,∗ a Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy b ICRIOS, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy ∗ Corresponding
author at: Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Lee), [email protected] (F. Malerba). Available online xxx
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.09.008 0048-7333/Crown Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Lee, K., Malerba, F., Theory and empirical evidence of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership. Res. Policy (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.09.008
ARTICLE IN PRESS Research Policy xxx (2016) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Research Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/respol
Editorial
Theory and empirical evidence of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership
Many industries witness more than once a change in industrial leadership and successive catch-up by late entrants. The incumbent fails to maintain its superiority in terms of production or market share, and a latecomer catches up with the incumbent. Subsequently, the latecomer, having gained the leadership, loses it to another latecomer. We describe this phenomenon of successive changes in industrial leadership in terms of “catch-up cycles”, where catch-up means a substantial closing of the gap in market share between firms in the leading country and firms in the latecomer or follower country. This Special Issue attempts to explain these phenomena with two conceptual and modelling papers (Lee and Malerba, 2016; Landini, Lee and Malerba, 2016) and a number of sectoral studies: on mobile phones (Giachetti and Marchi, 2016), semiconductor memory chips (Shin, 2015), cameras (Kang and Song, 2016), steel (Lee and Ki, 2016), mid-sized jets (Vértesy, 2016), and wine (Morrison and Rabellotti, 2016). In most of the sectors examined, the leadership moves to Asian countries: only for mid-size aircraft and wine does the leadership change in favour of Latin America and Europe. In addition, the analysis of the wine sector allows us to shed some light on the dynamics of natural resource-based sectors. The framework for the theoretical and empirical analysis is based on the notion of sectoral systems. During their evolution, certain discontinuities may take place: we call these “windows of opportunity”. The concept of windows of opportunity was first used by Perez and Soete (1988) to refer to the role of new technoeconomic paradigms in generating leapfrogging by latecomers who take advantage of a new paradigm and overtake the existing incumbents. The Special Issue broadens the notion of windows of opportunity by linking them to the building blocks of a sectoral system. It identifies three types of windows – technological, demand and institutional. Together with the notion of “windows of opportunity”, the Special Issue uses the concept of “response” by firms and systems. Some firms from emerging countries and other components of the sectoral system may respond successfully to the opening of windows and therefore rise to a position of global leadership, whereas falling behind the current leaders may be due to a lack of effectiveness in the response. In short, the thrust of the view proposed in this Special Issue is that diverse combinations
of windows of opportunity and the responses by firms and other components of the sectoral systems of latecomers and incumbents determine which pattern of successive catch-ups is most likely to emerge in a sector. Methodologically, most of the papers in this Special Issue are in the spirit of ‘appreciative theorizing’ (Nelson and Winter, 1982) and aim to provide ‘causal explanations of observed patterns’ of leadership changes across sectors. The development of this Special Issue was supported by a joint research program between Bocconi University and Seoul National University, under the framework of an international cooperation program managed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (2012K2A1A2031787) and the Catch-up Program coordinated by Richard Nelson. Previous versions of the papers making up this Special Issue were presented and discussed at the Bocconi University Milan Workshop (2012), the Seoul Workshop (2013), and the 2013 Globelics Conference. We wish to thank Richard Nelson, the discussants at the Workshops and the referees of this journal for their very useful comments. Professor Keun Lee Economics Department, Seoul National University, Gwanak-ro 1, Seoul, 151-746, South Korea Professor Franco Malerba a,b,∗ a Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy b ICRIOS, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy ∗ Corresponding
author at: Department of Management and Technology, Bocconi University, Via Sarfatti 25, 30135 Milano, Italy. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (K. Lee), [email protected] (F. Malerba). Available online xxx
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.09.008 0048-7333/Crown Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Lee, K., Malerba, F., Theory and empirical evidence of catch-up cycles and changes in industrial leadership. Res. Policy (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2016.09.008