Guest editorial

Citation

Tiong, R. (2010), "Guest editorial", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 4 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/cms.2010.32304daa.002

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Chinese Management Studies, Volume 4, Issue 4

China is becoming a force in its own right in high-tech innovation and is itself fostering high-tech giants. The country is steadily climbing the technological ladder and has been producing and exporting more and more high-tech goods to the rest of the world. Chinese Management Studies (CMS) has therefore arranged a special issue on management in the high-tech sector in China to examine this new transformation. This special issue begins with an empirical paper by William Abbott Foster and Russell C. Reinsch entitled, “Huawei’s leadership role in IMS standards development and in its own proprietary Softswitch”, providing a case study of China’s Huawei Technologies Company Ltd’s leading role and its success factors.

The second paper is “Moving upward in global value chains: the innovations of mobile phone developers in China” by Sunny Li Sun, Hao Chen and Erin G. Pleggenkuhle-Miles. Their study indicates that firms in China can strengthen their innovation capabilities more in their domestic market by focusing on R&D and marketing rather than continuing the original equipment manufacturer/original design manufacturer modes in global value chains.

The third paper, “Industrial influences on R&D transfer to China” by Peder Veng Søberg, provides a framework for innovation related industrial contingencies on R&D transfer, which is illustrated by two cases of foreign invested R&D establishments in China. Influencing factors including speed of technological development, transformation between exploration and exploitation, innovation performance are identified and their influences on R&D transfer are also discussed.

Marcus Conté and Markus Taube in the fourth paper “Regional specialization in China’s biopharmaceutical industry”, systematically examine the regional patterns and determinants of specialization within China’s biopharmaceutical industry. Several firm agglomerations representing China’s geography of innovation have been developed as a result of both government policy and the strategic location decision of economic actors.

The fifth paper, “Cluster network and innovation under transitional economy: an empirical study of the Shaxi garment cluster” by Zheng He and Lez Rayman-Bacchus, explores how networks within the cluster influence firms’ commitment to innovation. Their analysis shows that firm-level commitment to innovation is significantly stimulated by three groups of factors, i.e. competitor action and cooperation in the supply chain, membership of various government and industry associations and government stimulus policies in the cluster.

The sixth paper, “A comparative innovation study of China, Japan and Taiwan”, by William H.A. Johnson and Michael Chuang, compares the two (arguably) most successful innovation-based Asian economies with Mainland China in order to examine where China stands in terms of country-level indicators of proactive innovation.

Finally, this special issue ends with an empirical study by Dong Wang and Hui-qi Pei titled, “Transfer of Shenzhen’s high-tech industries: an empirical study”. These two authors analyze the transfer of Shenzhen’s high-tech industries by a survey on 1,573 high-tech companies, with particular emphasis on its motives, characteristics and influence on Shenzhen’s economy and industrial upgrading.

Robert Tiong