The Mechanism Of Synergistic Innovation In Chinese Telecommunications Industry: Towards A National Standardization Strategy

With the speed-up of the telecommunications technology revolution and the intensification of the global competition, the importance of telecommunications standards has been highlighted. In view of the strategic significance, setting and implementing standard strategy has been used as an important means to participate in the international competition, and spur indigenous innovation. Consequently, many countries lay their emphases on the issue of how to stimulate innovation and promote their domestic (territorial) technologies as the international telecommunications standards. At the same time, from the issurance of the "Outline of National Medium and Long-term Science and Technology Development Plan (2006-2020) " in 2006, China has decided to pursue innovation, and, viewed the intellectual property rights and standardization strategy as the significant instruments to touch the goal of becoming an innovation-based country by 2020. While current literatures on standardization have mainly focused on developed countries, this study tries to shed some light on standardization in developing countries, by examining the case of China, a developing country who has made great efforts in indigenous technological development and implementation. Therefore, how can China optimize its standardization strategy and improve current standard innovation mechanism has been the focus of this study.The accomplishment of this study mainly dependense on two combinations. Firstly, the combination of the individual case analysis and comparative study offers a baseline for the empirical study of the domestic and global standardization practices. More importantly,the combination of the classical socio-technological construction approach-------Actor-network Theory, and the system approach------Synergetics lays a solid foundationfor achieving the final research purpose. Furthermore, the patent information gives an important data support to analyze the innovation activities and strategy. On the basis of the in-depth empirical and theoretical study, it could come to the following contributions:(1) To understand the leading companies' innovation strategy in China, this study offers an empirical study on the innovation activities of the Chinese telecommunications industry, by analyzing the invention patent information.(2) Comparative study of the standardization and innovation in European, United States, Japan, and South Korea. Based on this part of study, different models and relevant details of telecommunications standardization and innovation have been concluded. Some implications have been summarized for China.(3) By taking the security standard of the wireless local area network------WirelessLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI) and the third generation mobiletelecommunications standard------Time Division-Synchronous Code Division MultipleAccess (TD-SCDMA) as the highly relevant cases, this part of study investigates the standardization and innovation in China from the actor-network perspective.(4) Based on the analysis of the synergistic architecture of telecommunications standardization and innovation, a synergistic standard innovation mechanism has been proposed. The cases of WAPI and TD-SCDMA have been further used to prove the validation of such mechanism.