Elucidating How Environment Affects Patterns of Network Change: A Case Study of the Evolution of an Industrial Network in the Flat Panel Display Sector

Abstract

As science and technology policy-makers focus on understanding how industry networks evolve, this study discusses how environmental changes affect the evolution of industrial networks, especially in the flat panel display (FPD) sector. By investigating different environmental scenarios, it can be shown that changes of environmental munificence and environmental uncertainty simultaneously affect industrial network transition and reshape distinctive network formations. Data from 71 countries from 1976 to 2008 have been examined to empirically evaluate their network relationships. This study, thus, demonstrates a longitudinal evolutionary trajectory for the FPD industry and locates the essential transition of technological competition via international technological coevolution. The analytical results demonstrate that different environmental scenarios provide different opportunities for countries to develop their niche competence in the FPD industry. Our findings provide insightful implications for policy-makers and business practitioners involved in dynamic and competitive global industries similar to FPD.

From Birth through Transition to Maturation: The Evolution of Technology‐Based Alliance Networks

“…The implications for structural and positional embeddedness are as follows. A decrease in technological uncertainty and a decrease in munificence lead, through an increase in deletions of existing collaborations, to a pattern of “network shrinking” (Huang, Shih, Ke, and Liu, ; Koka et al., ). In this process, also indirect linkages between firms will be disappearing, which makes the connectivity of the established network structure start to diminish during the transition phase.…”

Research on the competing evolution model and empirical analysis of complex network

“…These relationships may vary from weak to strong, depending on the connections between resources, the complementarities of activity structures and the bonds established between individual enterprises. Complex and strong relationships imply a degree of connectedness of relationships -a change in one of these relationships may have important repercussions on other relationships [3].…”