Industrial Innovation in China: Emerging Challenges and New Issues

This book provides an in-depth analysis of industrial innovation in China, assessing the progress China has made in re-structuring and re-configuring its innovation systems in the context of the massive and multifaceted program of economic reform. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of industrial innovation, such as research and development (R&D), intellectual property, technological adaptation, and government policy. Some chapters adopt a comparative perspective, comparing the Chinese case with important economies such as Korea and India and the global economy more generally. It shows that the reform process has had a powerful impact on China’s industrial innovation, suggesting that a new system is emerging that is much more driven by market forces and has been heavily influenced by China’s growing interactions with the outside world. It argues that the launch of the Chinese government’s new Medium-to-Long-term Strategy & Technology Plan, 2006-2020 (MLP), represents an important demarcation point in the evolution of the Chinese national innovation system. The MLP promises to alter the prevailing trajectory of Chinese innovation in a fundamental way, putting the enterprise at centre stage in an effort to secure better linkages between those organisations that generate new ideas and those responsible for the commercialisation of these ideas. Finally, it addresses the crucial question of whether China has embarked on a path that will lead it to becoming a true technological superpower. Overall, this book puts forward a sophisticated, insightful, and realistic set of assessments about the capabilities of China’s industrial innovation, a crucial determining factor of China’s future economic performance.