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In Section 2 of the paper we set out the framework for our analysis. In
particular, we reject the clear-cut distinction between 'innovation' and 'dif-
fusion', with its implication that 'adopters' play no role in developing or
changing the technologies they choose and use. In contrast we emphasize the
importance of active involvement in technical change even by firms, indus-
tries and economies which acquire technology developed elsewhere. We
therefore distinguish between two stocks of resources: (i) the skills, knowl-
edge and institutions that make up a country's capacity to generate and
manage change in the industrial technology it uses (i.e. its technological
capabilities), and (ii) the capital goods, knowledge and labour skills required
to produce industrial goods with 'given' technology (i.e. a country's indust-
rial production capacity). By 'technological accumulation' we mean the
needed about technology and the longer term dynamics of industrial growth
in both developed and developing countries.
TECHNOLOGICAL INDUSTRIAL
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CAPABIUTY ^ OUTPUT
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1. Kmrtadoa, 8kOa and -Uttof kmatmant Protects " " T - r 1 * Laoour Sana
Japan, see Kodama, 1991). At the same time, in order to generate com-
petitive rates of technical change, firms have greatly increased expenditures
on raising the skills and knowledge of their human resources, and combined
this with the development of novel institutional mechanisms for doing so:
see, for example, Wiggenhorn (1990) for details of the striking case of
Motorola (which has raised training and education expenditures from $7
million to $60 million per year and developed its own corporate university),
or the more general review of "Corporate Classrooms' in Eurich and Boyer
(1985).
Second, alongside this quantitative trend is a less clearly definable qualita-
tive shift towards increased differentiation and specialization in the knowl-
edge resources used by industrial firms. A growing distinction has emerged
Key Characteristics
Whether tacit or codified and explicit, knowledge and skills are highly
specific to particular categories of industrial products and processes. In terms
that are blindingly obvious, a firm making cheap textiles would find it
virtually impossible to diversify into making personal computers (although
some of the Korean chaebol have made diversification jumps almost as great
as this). It is less obvious—but equally true—that the computer firm could
not make textiles efficiently, even assuming it had the incentive to do so. As
industrial technologies have become increasingly complex, these kinds of
specificity have become evident at much more detailed levels. In the Japanese
steel industry, for example, small technologically dynamic firms seeking to
diversify across quite narrow differences in products and processes (e.g. from
construction bars to structural beams) have found it necessary in the 1990s to
on 'insider' methods of corporate control, are more effective than the Anglo-
Saxon systems in ensuring commitment to long-term corporate goals, in-
cluding technological accumulation (Corbett and Mayer, 1991). There have
also been strong criticisms of systems of corporate management that em-
phasize hierarchical organizational forms and short-term financial targets,
to the neglect of functional skills in R&D, production and marketing, and
effective linkages among them (Abernathy and Hayes, 1980; Chandler,
1989).
At the heart of this debate is a concern about how to devise a system of
supporting institutions to ensure that market processes fully evaluate and
encourage cumulative learning—or technological accumulation (Pavitt and
Patel,. 1988). In addition to the consequences of non-appropriability already
issues that we discuss below. First, we identify five sectoral categories that
capture many of the differences among those paths of technological accumu-
lation; second, these categories are associated with differing modes of main-
taining existing bases of international competitiveness and with processes of
inter-sectoral evolution that alter the basis of competitiveness over time.
Cross-Sectional Contrasts
Such trajectories have not been pre-ordained, in either their rate or their
direction. Nonetheless, in most cases three mechanisms seem to have been
particularly influential: (i) factor endowments; (ii) directions of persistent in-
vestment, especially those with strong intersectoral linkages; (iii) the cumu-
lative mastery of core technologies and their underlying knowledge bases.
The relative significance of these mechanisms has changed during the process
of industrialization. In the early stages, the directions of technical change in
a country or region were strongly influenced by local market inducement
mechanisms related to scarce (or abundant) factors of production and local
investment opportunities. At higher levels of development, the local accu-
mulation of specific technological skills itself became a focusing device for
technical change.
East Asian patterns. It remains to be seen whether they will (i) shift rapidly
into trajectories of structural change that lead towards competitiveness in the
more knowledge-based sectors, or (ii) remain substantially locked into sectors
where competitiveness rests primarily on relatively low wage rates and
(temporarily?) abundant natural resources.
Obviously many factors must be considered in any explanation of the
differences in the dynamic performance of firms and countries outlined
above. It is striking, however, that they appear to be associated with
considerable differences in the underlying patterns of technological accumu-
lation.
selves; and (ii) its innovative activities made only a limited contribution to
technical change in industry (e.g. Desai, 1980). However, in three more
detailed dimensions, the roles of these infrastructural institutions in the East
Asian NICs, and their importance relative to the accumulation activities of
firms themselves, have been similar to patterns in' the earlier experience of
the currently developed countries, but very different from the most common
patterns in other developing countries.
First, especially since the 1970s, many of the R&D institutes in the East
Asian NICs have emphasized the 'two faces' of R&D—both the innovation
face and the learning (or technology absorption) face (Cohen and Levinthal,
1989). By emphasizing their learning role in relation to existing technology,
rather than concentrating solely on the generation of technological innova-
• In,any case, even for R&D alone, the balance changed considerably
during the 1980s. This was most striking in Korea where, within a
rapidly growing total, the 20/80% distribution in R&D activity be-
tween intra-firm and infrastructural institutions in the 1970s had been
reversed to 80/20% by the early 1990s.
In these and other ways, firms in the East Asian NICs have used inter-
national transfer as a channel for actively investing in learning—though not
necessarily by doing. But having learned (often with pressure and/or support
from government), they ensured that future doing was localized in order to
strengthen and further develop the initially acquired stock of capabilities.
In other developing countries, technology transfer has been much less
intensively linked into the process of domestic technological accumulation.
It has played a major role in the expansion of production capacity, but a
minor role in building technological capabilities. Commercial technology
transfer arrangements quite evidently have been used in several firms and
industries in the larger Latin American countries to augment technological
capabilities as well as production capacity—for example, in the Brazilian
steel industry (Dahlman and Fonseca, 1987) and petrochemical industry
(Sercovich, 1980). However, such cases appear to have been relatively infre-
quent. In other countries, that type of complementarity has been rare—for
example Girvan and Marcelle (1990), or virtually absent—for example, see
Mytelka (1978) and Vianna (1985) on some of the smaller Latin American
countries; Farrell (1979) on Trinidad; Quazi (1983) on Bangladesh; Scott-
Kemmis and Bell (1988) on India; Ng tt al. (1986) on the non-NIC South
194
Technological Accumulation and Industrial Growth
East Asian countries; and Mlawa( 1983), Mytelka( 1985, 1992), Ohiorhenuan
and Poloamina (1992), and Wangwe (1992) on a range of African countries.
It is not our intention to suggest that, apart from the East Asian NICs, the
rest of the industrializing countries of the late twentieth century constitute
some kind of enormous 'technological desert', in which the growth, of
industrial production capacity has been accompanied by no significant tech-
nological accumulation. Bearing in mind that technical progress in most of
the industrialized countries continues to move ahead of the industrializing
countries, what we have tried to suggest is the following.
' • Many firms in most of a rapidly changing structure of industries in East •
Asian NICs have increased production efficiency and product quality/
performance at rates which imply some significant degree of 'catching
One can obviously draw up a long list of plausible causes of the limited
technology accumulation in such a large proportion of industry in developing
195
Technological Accumulation and Industrial Growth
countries over recent decades. Within such a list, some analysts might
emphasize the importance of differences in trade policy, suggesting perhaps
that we have simply drawn yet another contrast between countries with
liberal, outward-looking policy regimes and considerable economic success,
and those with protectionist and inward-looking regimes with much less
success. However, as is increasingly well recognized, the industrialization
experience of the East Asian NICs encompasses a wide range of different
trade policy regimes—for example, see Pack and Westphal (1986) on Korea
and Wade (1990) on Taiwan. The experience of other developing countries
also encompasses a wide range; and, over earlier periods, rapid technological
accumulation in Japan was associated with highly protectionist and (initially)
inward-looking regimes.
The third is that the learning processes by which those resources are
accumulated are also complex and specialized. In particular, although formal
education and training in institutions outside industry provide essential
bases of skill, this has to be augmented by learning within firms. However,
important as it is, learning by doing provides only part of what is needed. In
addition, and often in large part ahead of doing, accumulating a particular
area of competence will require learning by explicit intra-firm training,
by managed experience accumulation, and by other means. Also learning by
whatever means in one specialized area of competence (e.g. routine produc-
tion or maintenance) will make only a limited contribution to learning in
others (e.g. process engineering).
The fourth is that the experience of today's developed and developing
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