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Taking Southeast Asian emerging economies as an empirical case, this study explores how the reverse salients that have emerged during the transitional process may be overcome efficiently and effectively. In particular, three action-oriented case studies derived from a heuristic research approach are presented to show how Taiwan is empowering its universities and public research institutes to act as innovation niche seeders for Southeast Asian economies, thereby compensating for the weakness of their socio-technical systems (i.e. the reverse salients). Presently, the government-led policies of Southeast Asian countries are largely oriented towards incentivizing foreign multinational corporations to lead the development of domestic production networks. This strategy allows these countries to acquire the necessary resources for an economic transition in the era of digitalization, although at the expense of developing their own innovation niches. This study presents the urgency of a need for a new approach, and a new avenue for emerging countries to develop an effective and efficient governance model. The proposed model would allow external institutional mechanisms, such as universities and public research institutes, to act as critical intermediaries providing an alternative solution for the dilemmas faced by small and medium-sized enterprise-centric emerging countries. Policy implications for building sustainable socio-technical regimes in Southeast Asia’s transitional emerging countries are also discussed.

Based on country-level comparisons, this study applies geographic (internal vs. external) and knowledge (exploitation vs. exploration) boundaries to explore the influence of knowledge sources and ambidexterity on production and innovation performance in the thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) industries of the three major players, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, from 1995 to 2009. Our findings suggest that different resource-based industrial development strategies are associated with the specific knowledge acquisition strategies in the technology leader, Japan and its followers, Korea and Taiwan. The contribution of this study is empirical verification of the influence of knowledge sources and ambidextrous capabilities on production and innovation activities in the TFT-LCD industries of these countries. Since each country is endowed with different resources, this study aims to reveal the strong implications of this for the design of an industrial strategy that has to acquire both known and new knowledge through internal and external sources simultaneously, while carefully integrating them and exploiting their interactions.

This paper investigates the technological innovation capabilities of the three Asian latecomers--namely Taiwan, China, and Korea--in the emergent solar photovoltaic industry. For this study, I deploy a new dataset of 75,540 solar photovoltaic patents taken out by Taiwan, China and Korea over the period of 31 years (1978---2008) and analyse the evolving technological innovation capabilities revealed in these patents using a set of four technology platforms that I constructed. This study demonstrates the patent portfolios of the three latecomers and explores what extent have the Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean followers developed their technological innovation capabilities so as to surpass the US, German, and Japan and acquire the leading production positions; and how the variations of technological innovation capabilities among the major producers influence their business activities in the global solar photovoltaic industry. The results show the various strategies adopted by Taiwan, China, and Korea to develop their solar photovoltaic industries, reflect their different national innovation systems involved, and response to the current trends of technology development in the global solar photovoltaic industry.