Industry Technology Evolution Approach And Mechanism

In the market, enterprises are facing a survival competition, in which they must gain and sustain efficiency in order to keep survived. The requirement of efficiency shows in the production organization as increasing productivity. The main way to get greater productivity in modern enterprises is to make progress in technology. Under the pressure of survival competition, enterprises will be motivated to rely on technology innovation to get greater productivity. The innovation will be spread through the whole industry by the way of adaptive selection and make the adaptively efficient technology dominate the production. The technology issue includes two aspects, which are the production tools as in accuracy and automation, and the procedure which stands for the method of production. These two aspects of technology are coalesced and simulative. The history of automobile technology development shows us that every step this industry made was actually the result of technology innovation and progress. In this article, I shall choose the representative innovation as the background to analysis the evolution approach and mechanism of innovation from Ford to Toyota, in which I shall try to find some certain general principles which might provide some implication to China's automobile industry development.The research has mainly focused on the enterprise resource management and capability theory perspective and less on the dynamic and evolutionary perspective. In this article, the analysis of technology innovation shall be based on the foundation of evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory is a subject which applies some results of biological evolutionary theory and natural science to study economic phenomenon and behavioral evolution principles and it is of great applicable value in social science. Convention is the base of evolutionary analysis, which is an analog of gene in biology. I shall use the biological metaphor to take the evolution of automobile technology innovation as an analog of survival competition in biologically genetic evolution. Through analysis of heredity process like environmental selection, duplication of convention, study, consolidation and approach reliance etc, we will come to a conclusion which is China's automobile enterprises should overcome the approach reliance of technology convention, strengthen the capability of innovation and use the selection effect of market institution in order to accelerate the innovation and evolutionary process of the industry.