Firms' strategies in the global innovation system: Knowledge sharing in the flat panel display industry

In this dissertation, I investigated whether firms achieve higher innovative performance by appropriating technological knowledge for the sole use of their own researchers or by sharing it with competitors. The term "innovative performance" refers to a firm's ability to develop and hold intellectual property rights over a new product that is desired by large commercial markets. I argued that firms operating in the earliest phase of the emergence of a high technology industry will achieve higher innovative performance by sharing technological knowledge than by keeping it secret.;A firm's innovative performance depends on its ability to convince commercial markets of the superiority of its own product design over alternatives. A firm's product is more likely to achieve market acceptance if the firm can shape the criteria used to evaluate new products. Further, a firm can wield influence over these evaluation criteria by sharing its technological knowledge with competitors. Therefore, a firm that shares technological with competitors can effectively shape emerging evaluation criteria in favor of its own product design and achieve high innovative performance. In global industries, a firm that shares knowledge with foreign competitors in its global innovation system (GIS) should achieve higher innovative performance than one that shares knowledge merely with domestic competitors in its national innovation system (NIS). A qualitative case and large sample empirical study of firms in the flat panel display industry provided several interesting results.;Firms from the U.S., Japan, and Europe actively designed strategies to share knowledge with their innovation systems. Counter to conventional wisdom, Japanese firms did not share less knowledge with the GIS than their counterparts in the U.S. Additionally, firms that shared knowledge with their GIS earned higher innovative performance than firms that did not shared knowledge. A regression that included each firm's size, research effort, learning from the NIS and GIS, and sharing of knowledge with the NIS and GIS, predicted innovative performance and yielded an R-Squared of.639. The relationship between sharing knowledge with the GIS and innovative performance was significant and positive. However, the relationship between sharing knowledge within the NIS and innovative performance was not significant.