Innovation and corporate catching-up in China: A configurational approach

This PhD thesis examines how Chinese latecomer firms in the photovoltaic (PV)
and wind power equipment manufacturing industries have navigated technoeconomic catch-up development using a set-theoretic configurational approach. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) involves the systematic exploration of similarities and differences in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions related to particular outcomes, enabling the identification of complex typological patterns across multiple cases. Overall, the study findings show that differences in latecomer catch-up strategies and the underlying modal processes of learning, technological capability building, and innovation (i.e., learning inputs) are associated with differences in techno-economic firm performance (i.e., learning outputs). Equifinal multi-modal configurations of learning orientations are found to differ not only across (groups of) firms but also across firm performance classes – both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. While there are no necessary conditions, the configurational analyses reveal distinct combinatorial regularity patterns of modal learning conditions that prove sufficient for certain performance achievement outcomes, facilitating the understanding of implicit learning-based typological firm clusters in techno-economic development and catching-up; in other words, similarly successful firms exhibit consistent or consistently similar modal approaches to learning, technological capability building, and innovation.
This is an intriguing conceptual-analytical insight, as it conveys the essential idea that ‘context matters’.