| The development of technology is an important driving force of a nation's economic growth and the technology development strategy is a significant part of its economic development strategy. Since late 1990s, China brought forward the leapfrogging strategy of social productivity, thus relevant technology leapfrogging strategy is drawing increasingly more attention of the whole society.Although some scholars from both home and abroad have put forward the concept of technology leapfrogging as early as mid-1980s, researches in this field are still at a start with some basic theoretical problems left unsolved such as the concept and classification of technology leapfrogging and how to realize technology leapfrogging.The importance of technological learning for technology development of a developing country is recognized by more researchers. A well-known scholar Amsden said "if the industrialization of England is based on inventions and that of Germany and America is based on innovation, the on-stage industrialization in some developing countries is based on learning.A precondition of this research is technological learning (in the form of mechanism of technological learning) has a strong impact on technology leapfrogging of a developing country. Highly efficient technological learning is a significant condition for realizing technology leapfrogging, based on which this paper made the research on the relationship of mechanism of technological learning and technology leapfrogging of lagging enterprises.To be more concrete, there are three major issues: (1) How to make the concept of technology leapfrogging more accurate and clear? (2) How about the relationship of obtaining mechanism of technological information of technological learning mechanism and the incremental technology leapfrogging in lagging enterprises? (3) How about the relationship of transforming mechanism of technological knowledge of technological learning mechanism and the incremental technology leapfrogging in lagging enterprises?This paper advanced some theoretical hypotheses based on early researches and tested those hypotheses using the data of Chinese communicating-device manufactories and electronic enterprises.The main contributions of this paper lie in:(1) Based on literature summaries, this paper put forward a strict and practical concept of technology leapfrogging by making use of concept transpositioning in scientific philosophy and the classical tool of S curve in technology management. Our concept of technology leapfrogging is: "If there are two enterprises A and B engaging in the same technological development (eg technological development of DRAM), A is a leading enterprise on technology and B is a lagging one. If B can gain more improvement of technological capability than A with the same R&D investment at an early corresponding period, we know technology leapfrogging is taking place in B. Compared with other concepts, the biggest advantages of this one are itsclearness, strictness and measurability. Based on this concept, the method ofmeasuring technology leapfrogging is brought forward. (2) For the relationship of obtaining mechanism of technological information(in the form of technological information source) and incrementaltechnology leapfrogging, this paper took the research from three aspects:inner technological information source, technology import and technologyspillovers, we find that:â‘ Inner technological information source of enterprises, that is R&D activities have distinct positive effect on technology leapfrogging. But such a positive effect is only embodied by research investment (measured by ratio of research investment of enterprises) while investment at other stages of enterprises (including investment at developing and middle stages) doesn't have notable effect on technology leapfrogging.â‘¡ For the relationship of technology import and incremental technology leapfrogging, we find that:Technology import doesn't have distinct positive effect on technology leapfrogging, even considering the moderative effect of R&D investment. After analyzing the composition of technology import, we know this is because China mainly carries out capital import. According to the model of technology import flow of M.Bell (1987), such a kind of technology flow can not bring lagging enterprises to the orbit of technological progress. This research proved the model of technology flow given by M.Bell about the relationship of capital import and technological development of developing countries.â‘¢ This paper carries out the research on the impact of technology spillovers on incremental technology leapfrogging from two majoraspects--international technology spillovers/domestic technologyspillovers and industrial technology spillovers/academic technology spillovers. We find that:Among all kinds of technological information sources, international technology spillovers has the most distinct positive effect on technology leapfrogging while its effect requires lagging enterprises to possess strong absorptive capacities. It tells us that to have technology leapfrogging, an enterprise must absorb advanced international technological knowledge, international technology spillovers also has conditions to take place, that is enterprises must have strong absorptive capacities. At the same time, when considering the impact of international technology spillovers on economy of developing countries, the absorptive capacities of domestic enterprises must also be taken into consideration besides technological differences (Findlay, 1978) and the competition among multinational enterprises (Wang and Bolmstrom, 1992).Domestic technology spillovers don't have notable positive effect on technology leapfrogging of lagging enterprises. But after considering the moderative effect of absorptive capacities, we find that its interactive effectwith absorbing capacity has distinct negative effect on technology leapfrogging. This is because domestic technological activities are a kind of imitation and its overflowing technological knowledge can not meet the needs of technology leapfrogging. With more attention on domestic technology spillovers but limited resources, its investment on international technology spillovers would decrease which produces negative impact on technology leapfrogging.Both industrial technology spillovers itself and its interactive effect with absorptive capacity have notable positive effects on technology leapfrogging. This indicates that an enterprise even without absorptive capacity would be influenced by industrial technology spillovers.Benefiting from its close relation with technological knowledge. Relatively strong absorptive capacities would therefore increase the efficiency of technological knowledge transforming which then has more influence on technology leapfrogging.An enterprise without absorptive capacity can not benefit from academic technology spillovers but one with strong absorptive capacity can benefit from academic technology spillovers though it has weak influence on technological leapfrogging.â‘£ The diversity of channels of technology spillovers doesn't have positive effect on technology leapfrogging which shows that with limited resources, the enterprise would like to put more attention on how to make use of existing channels of technology spillovers than on expanding the channels.(3) For the relationship of transforming mechanism of technological learning (technological absorptive capacity) with incremental technology leapfrogging, we find that:Absorptive capacity of an enterprise has moderative effect on the relationship of technology spillovers and technology leapfrogging which is consistent with common conclusions of researches on absorptive capacity. But our methods of measuring technological absorptive capacity are different from single-dimension measurement in early researches (eg. Wolfgang Becker and Jurgen Peters (2000) measured by R&D laboratories, G. N. Stock, et al. (2001) measured by R&D investment strength, Gerard Georgea,et aI.(2001) measured by R&D payout and numbers of patents). Our measurement is multi-dimensional with several indices which is more consistent with the concept of technological absorptive capacity (S.A.Zahra and G.George, 2002).(4) By using data, this paper also takes researches on the relationship of technology import with R&D investment of developing countries, we find that:â‘ Concerning whether R&D investment of enterprises has influence on technology import (whether technological capacities of enterprises have distinct influence on technology import),our statistical results show that after controlling the influence of all the controlled variables (scale of enterprise, ratio of products sold domestically and internationally,ownership of enterprise and the industry it belonges to), only the product technological capacity has notable positive effect on technology import, that is, stronger product technological capacity will lead to more technology import, but the level of prominence of such positive effect is not high which only has a weak support to the major research conclusion in thisfield--Katrak (1997) 's research on Indian enterprises. It also indicatesthat there are some misunderstandings in existing literatures aboutrelationship of absorptive capacity and R&D investment--R&Dinvestment doesn't necessarily bring out absorptive capacity and the two is not equivalent, R&D investment would neither improve the understanding and digest of enterprises about outer technological information and thus the initial technological capacity doesn't have positive influence on technological invitation.(2) For whether technology import would influence R&D investment of an enterprise, our statistical results show that: during the period of innovation, technology import would increase its investment on R&D, during the period of creative imitation, technology import would increase its investment on R&D at the development stage and during the period of reproductive imitation, technology import would increase its investment on R&D at the starting stages of wholesale production.It shows that the relationship of technology import and technological investment is influenced by stages of technological overtaking and early researches missed this important controlled variable. |
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