This paper examines how two historically low-technology economies, Finland and Israel, assumed leadership in new, rapid innovation-based industries. The paper argues that Schumpeterian development agencies, the Finnish Fund for Research and Development and the Israeli Office of the Chief...

This paper explains why many small and medium-sized private high-technology Chinese manufacturing firms survive and thrive within an institutional and political system arrayed against them. We use the mobile phone handset industry as an illustrative case of the vitality and capabilities of...

This paper advances an argument about the need to take into account two components of state-industry relations if we are to fully understand economic development and policy trajectory, as well as industry-state co-evolution. The first component, the specific structure of the bureaucracy and...

Both systems of innovation and cluster theories emphasize the importance of institutions that facilitate learning and information diffusion as well as community building for the continuous success of industrial systems. Nevertheless, they fail to combine their insights into a general...

In the last decade, three countries have figured prominently as cases of late-late developing countries that achieved worldwide success with their Information Technology (IT) industries: India, Ireland, and Israel. This paper focuses on the Israeli case and argues that unlike India and Ireland,...

The Israeli software industry has been an indisputable success since the 1990s. This paper micro-analyzes the industry and compares its unique historical development pattern with those of other emerging countries. It explains: (1) the rise of the industry as a part of the development of the...

China's manufacturing and innovation capabilities are directly related. Availability of complementary resources in rapid prototyping, test production and components and the ability to deploy innovations at scale increasingly leads high-technology firms, including startups, to consider China as a...

Global Value Chains (GVC) are a channel for upgrading firm capabilities. Over the last four decades, China has rapidly grown as a result of participation in GVCs. It has become central to global production networks in many industries, accelerating the process of global diffusion of...

This paper addresses the puzzle of how Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the mobile handset industry overcome an environment of “structured uncertainty” and innovate. We find that a combination of the global fragmentation of production and a tacit alliance between local...