Technological Catch-Up and Innovative Entrepreneurship in Vietnamese Firms

Abstract

The article analyses the dynamics of technological catch-up through entrepreneurship in latecomer firms to emerging markets. With this aim, the article introduces Vietnam’s experience and illustrates the result of three case studies of Vietnamese technology firms at different stages of their evolution. Insights from the cases reveal all follow an incremental innovation model based on business model ‘soft’ innovations, mainly in customer-facing activities and partnering, as well as limited products and technology adaptation to local market needs. Consistently with latecomer firms’ theory, the market drives these firm’s innovation efforts, which are concentrated on developing new services and comprehensive solutions rather than new technologies. Comparisons of the findings with recent and similar experiences of Chinese firms highlight that different stages of catch-up lead to different innovation practices in nature and degree, and the need to strengthen institutions to face competition, rather than use the former to shelter from the latter. The Vietnamese firms’ innovation practices and catch-up patterns found are then discussed under the perspective of reaping the benefits of international knowledge and technology flows and the specific challenges faced by Vietnam. The paper concludes with several reflections, lessons learned and perspectives for other newly industrializing emerging countries.

Community development and social welfare through entrepreneurship management training

“…This study finds that the entrepreneurial management literacy material is material about how SMEs learn to overcome the obstacles of efficient production management, effective marketing management and strategic management and risks to find new value in the production of SMEs goods and services. With regard to entrepreneurial management theory, in line with the results of this study, it is stated that these entrepreneurial management tasks are part of organizational capability, which also includes embedded organizational processes that can be slow to change (Wau & Purwanto, 2021;Petti et al, 2021).…”