Beyond catch-up: could China become the global innovation powerhouse? China’s innovation progress and challenges from a holistic innovation perspective

Abstract

Over the past century and a half, global technological leadership has shifted from Europe to the United States, while scholars argue that the world has seen that it is now shifting from the United States to China due to China’s extraordinary catch-up in the past four decades, in which the public policy-oriented national innovation system development plays a critical role that might provide an alternative way for innovation-driven development especially for emerging markets. Even though encountering many challenges ahead, China is positioning itself to take over the global innovation leadership in the next few decades. Here in this article, we introduce a serious yet underexplored question: could China go beyond catch-up and become the global innovation powerhouse? Specifically, drawing from the holistic innovation perspective, which is an original theoretical paradigm for the mission-oriented innovation policy change, this article critically reviews, both qualitatively and quantitatively, China’s remarkable innovation progress and main drivers in comparison with G7 countries plus South Korea and India, trying to provide a comprehensive and critical view of state-of-the-art research on China’s innovation catch-up. We further explore the five major challenges that China must take seriously when marching toward the global innovation powerhouse. Finally, we propose a mission-oriented holistic STI policy design framework for both China and other emerging economies to go beyond catch-up in a competitive dynamic world. This article provides a new and holistic perspective to access China’s innovation progress and challenges, also generates novel insights for scholars and public agencies to contribute to global innovation development, with a shared goal of achieving global sustainable development in the post-COVID-19 pandemic world.

Az innovációmenedzsment-kutatások térbeli és időbeli szerkezetének változása 1975 és 2021 között

“…Ennek a változásnak főbb okai az alábbiak: -A Távol-Keleten a természetes erőforrásoknak köszönhetően számottevő tőkére tettek szert, amit nagy arányban kutatásokba is fektettek (Koide, 2009). -A Távol-Keleten megfelelően kiaknázták az innováció által teremtett előnyöket, valamint cselekedtek, nem pedig vártak (diktáló stratégia a követő helyett) (Chen et al, 2021;Litsareva, 2017). Kutatásunkban azt a célt tűztük ki, hogy ezeket a trendeket alátámasszuk az innovációval foglalkozó tudományos irodalom teljes körű (ám ebből kifolyólag korlátozott) gépi (adatbányászati) áttekintésével, átfésülésével, és megválaszoljuk azt a kérdést, hogy (RQ1) mi volt az innovációs kutatások fejlődésének fókusza az elmúlt évtizedekben a szakirodalom tükrében, illetve (RQ2) milyen változások történtek az innovációs kutatási akciópontokban.…”

Towards transformative leapfrogging

“…In many cases, latecomer countries either could not find alternative or more environmentally sustainable trajectories (Tukker, 2005;Rock et al, 2009;Schroeder, 2010) or do not find competitive positions in global industries due to the lack of technology transfer or upgrading, and hence remain trapped at middle-income levels (Gallagher, 2006;Rasiah, 2010;Binz et al, 2012;Lema and Lema, 2012;Schot and Steinmueller, 2018;Wieczorek, 2018;Yap and Truffer, 2019). Furthermore, several catch-up studies have recently discussed the urgency for fast-growing economies such as China to abort the catching-up mentality to escape the middle-income trap (Liu et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2021;Lee, 2021;Wu, 2022). We argue that, especially when considering the urgency for achieving sustainable development goals, the theorizing of leapfrogging must move beyond the current focus on global industrial or technological leadership in specific global value chains (GVCs) (Watson and Sauter, 2011) and start to embrace the transformation of entire sectoral systems.…”

Impact of multiple performance feedback and regional institutional development on enterprises’ exploratory innovation

“…In summary, this paper has three theoretical contributions: First, we enrich relevant research on the driving factors of enterprises' EI from the perspective of multiple performance feedback. Considering the impact of performance feedback on enterprise innovation prior studies mainly focused on a single reference point, namely, historical performance feedback or industry performance feedback (Chen et al, 2021); few studies have explored the impact of consistency between history and industry performance feedback on enterprise innovation (Lucas et al, 2015;Lv et al, 2019). In the cases of inconsistency, negative historical and positive industry performance feedback positively affected the enterprises' innovation (Ye and Zhao, 2021).…”