Push and Pull in Taiwan's Technology Transformation : Evaluating the Role of ITRI and Industrial Clusters in Fostering Sectoral Development in Taiwan

ITRI has been widely recognized as playing a major role in Taiwan’s technological transformation over the last thirty years. Taiwan’s ITRI stands out among the Northeast Asian Trio of “developmental states” as a state institution that often single-handedly led technological development rather than coordinating or just facilitating private efforts as in Korea and Japan. Yet, Taiwan has also stood out from its Northeast Asian neighbors in the fact that it has nurtured a range of vibrant, horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchical vertically networked industrial clusters. This paper sets out to account to examine how the top down push of ITRI and the societal pull of existing industrial clusters shaped sectoral outcomes in a variety of sectors with which ITRI became involved. The paper seeks to answer three questions. First, what accounts for success or failure of industrial development in those sectors the Taiwanese state chose to promote through ITRI? Second, what are the differences between the ITRIled successes and cluster-driven successes where state promotion was ineffectual? Finally, what are the implications for our conceptions of the varying roles of the state and society in development? The last question will revisit the seminal work of Thomas Gold, Richard Samuels and others who pushed for a nuanced view of the politics of development beyond what was offered in the developmental state literature, and through revisiting this literature, the paper will try to draw some further conclusions on the balance of state-societal relations across industrial sectors and across late developing nations