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This study investigates how, in the process of industrialization, Taiwan successfully developed its plastic waste industry into an industrial-level circular economy by leveraging a network-based collective bricolage in conjunction with a framework of adaptive institutional governance. Three conclusions are made: industrialized manufacturing sectors are foundations upon which developing nations can accumulate endogenous social capabilities and can enable the emergence of network-based collective bricolages; for developing nations that are attempting to establish circular economies based on their endogenous small-to-medium enterprises, developing network-based collective bricolages in conjunction with adaptive institutional governance is an essential and effective strategy; and transitioning into green-related sectors can further drive economic development and lead to the creation of new ventures, businesses, and job opportunities while supporting the formation of a circular economy. The approach is especially relevant for developing countries starting their industrialization process and waste management initiatives with few resources.

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.

This study attempts to extend the definition of social innovation within the context of academic entrepreneurship. We consider how academic entrepreneurs can undertake commercial activities, and which ones, and how these activities contribute to the contexts of social innovation. We explore two cases that are derived from two premier universities in Taiwan in terms of research and academic entrepreneurship: OurCityLove from National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) and the Forest app from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). The two cases show how social enterprises achieved the financial ability to expand their businesses and create the desired social values. While the first case, derived from NCTU, focused on providing useful information on social spaces, and services for the elderly, parents traveling with babies and those with disabilities (and also creating job opportunities for the latter), the other from NTHU created an app to influence those addicted to playing with their smartphones. The cases illustrate how the two universities capitalised on their technological competencies and academic programmes to support graduates and researchers in venturing into social entrepreneurship.

This study examines why the growth of biopharmaceutical firms in latecomer countries such as Taiwan has been slower than that of information and communication technology (ICT) firms. Unlike prior studies which have focused on the industry-level driving forces, this study offers a firm-level perspective to examine factors driving industry growth. By utilising the DEcision-MAking Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method, we analyse data collected in questionnaires with the top managers of biopharmaceutical and ICT firms in Taiwan, both public and non-public. We then compared and contrasted our empirical findings to capture theoretical and practical insights. Our empirical results demonstrate that the entrepreneurial activities of Taiwan’s biopharmaceutical firms are weak in terms of adaptation to external institutions and the utilisation of resources while the primary drivers of growth in Taiwan’s biopharmaceutical firms are rather (internal) institutional factors than resource-based factors, especially in the emerging and early growth stages. We conclude that the challenge for the latecomers lies on the institutional entrepreneurship to enable and affect the circulation of strategic resources so as to bring the firms onto the growth and mature stages.

While the remarkable economic growth of the East Asian latecomers reflects the success of technological catching-up strategies, few researchers have explored the extent to which the profits of innovation have been created and managed in their social contexts and how those profits are secured differently from that of technological leaders. This pioneer study offers empirical evidence and insights by exploring how different rents (value) were secured within the existing global technological regime by technological leaders and by latecomers over the period 1990 to 2009. Our results demonstrate that technological regimes, including technological congruence and social capabilities, affect technological leaders and latecomers in different ways resulting in a relationship where the two play complementary roles. The accumulation and utilization of social capabilities are essential for developing state-of-the-art technologies and securing profit from innovations in the global market. The insights and implications for both technological leaders and latecomers are discussed and elaborated.

The Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC) in China was designed to leverage Singaporean expertise in top-down city planning, systematic management, and water treatment technologies and act as a replicable hub-and-spoke model. This study shows that an expansion of the scale of urbanization, and its transformation into the focal point of the hub-and-spoke eco-city model will enable China to advance as an international pioneer, by the creation of a new socio-technical regime dependent on green and ecologically sustainable systems. In particular, the potential capacity of China's new socio-technical regime, built on eco-cities, is based on its capability to (1) create a vision for a smart energy system; (2) drive down the cost of renewable energy equipment and devices; (3) support local industrial clusters for socio-economic development; (4) implement effective policies for city-level solutions; and (5) standardize and replicate these strategies in the new regime as a whole. In the top-down landscape approach, the public authority's integrated administrative capability and capacity is important as a means by which to link the various types of stakeholders. This has to be done, in the process of managing a city's transition and reducing the risk of transformational failure, by reinforcing the four types of capital assets – namely manufacturing capital, natural capital, human capital, and social capital.

The task of substituting the entire global fossil-fueled energy system by renewables is increasingly discussed in the energy literature, but in the social sciences academy it is widely viewed as impossibly large within any meaningful timeframe. In this article we argue that such pessimism is ill-founded. Taking as our starting point the material and energy requirements of existing operating systems such as the Shams1 Concentrating Solar Power plant, we scale these up to generate the real resource demands of a renewable electrical energy system to supply the entire planet – and find these to be feasible, particularly if it is China that takes on the manufacturing challenge. We argue that such results need to be promoted more vigorously by energy and carbon management scholars.

The light-emitting diode (LED) sources have become the first efficiency recommendation and one of the top sustainability measures in building a sustainable economy and eco-friendly society. The emergence and rapid development of latecomers to low-carbon LED technology in Asia has shifted the oligopolistic structure that had been appropriated by the first-movers in the US, Europe and Japan. It is thus critical to understand the innovation trajectories and influential factors for reinforcing the development of the global LED industry. This study highlights the variations of technological regime in dominant firms, demonstrating that the eco-innovations in the global LED technological regime is built sequentially, by product innovation of international leaders through technological appropriation (i.e. intellectual property rights), process innovation of Korean and Taiwanese latecomers through production capability, followed by various diffusion modes integrating with Chinese and other latecomers through marke...

Renewable energies are advancing across many fronts – and now a new front has opened up in the form of dispatchable concentrating solar power (CSP). It is in emerging markets such as China, India and countries in North Africa and the Middle East as well as South America and southern Africa that CSP power plants with 24/7 dispatchable power are starting to be viewed as a viable way forward. The emerging CSP industrial value chain in China, India, southern Africa and elsewhere is expected to exert its consequent dramatic impact on cost reductions, which will in turn drive the diffusion of CSP around the world as a key challenger and alternative to nuclear and fossil fuel power. In this paper, we review these developments and discuss the effects attributable to the emerging learning curve, combined with technology progress involving molten salt heat transfer and reductions in water requirements, as well as patenting trends in the global CSP industry.

In this paper we extend work previously undertaken in industries such as semiconductor and flat panel displays to investigate knowledge flows from advanced countries (US, Japan and Europe) to catch-up follower countries (Taiwan, Korea and China), this time in the emergent solar photovoltaic industry. The solar photovoltaic industry is of particular interest in that it is poised between exploitation of first generation (crystalline silicon technologies) and new thin film and organic compound technologies, thus providing distinct sources of knowledge flow as measured by patent citations and linkage. For this study, we deploy a new database of 19,105 solar photovoltaic patents taken out by Taiwan, Korea and China at the USPTO over the 24 years 1984–2008, and analyse the knowledge flows revealed in these patents using a set of 12 International Patent Classification technology categories that we constructed. We demonstrate commonalities in patterns of knowledge flow between solar photovoltaic and earlier industries, but also suggestive differences, such as rising dependence of the catch-up countries on their own intra-national knowledge generation and flow, indicating their shift from imitation to innovation.

The world is on the cusp of major transformations of energy systems, with solar photovoltaic (PV) systems providing one of the most promising alternatives to fossil fuels. Amongst the countries moving to take advantage of the new production possibilities thus being opened up is Taiwan, employing in this new sector its characteristic strategies of fast followership that it has perfected in earlier industrial shifts involving semiconductors, ICT products and flat panel displays. This paper provides an interim assessment of Taiwan's early entry strategies, involving a focus on mainstream crystalline silicon solar cells, as well as entry into emerging niche sectors such as thin-film second-generation cells and concentrated solar cells utilizing novel semiconductor materials. Taiwan firms’ fast-follower strategies are highlighted and assessed in light of the literature on industrial dynamics and catch-up processes generally. The paper makes a contribution to theory in building nine propositions regarding fast ...

This study investigates the developmental trajectories of seven renewable energy technologies, namely geothermal, ocean, hydro, solar thermal, photovoltaic, thermal-PV hybrids, and wind energies, as well as the technological innovation capabilities of the global major players and countries. By using a set of patent classifications dedicated for renewable energies, this study identifies and analyses a total number of 127,705 renewable energy patent grants between 1970 and 2013. The results show that the technological development of renewables evolved as a consequence of, and focused on, solar thermal in the 1980s but it has extended to photovoltaic in the 2000s. Using the Relative Growth Rate indicator, our results reveal the developmental trends of future renewable energies in relation to R&D concentration in major countries. This study also demonstrates the various technological innovation capabilities of major countries, such as the US, Japan, Germany, China, and Korea in developing the seven above-mentioned renewable energy industries, by means of Relative Patent Position and Revealed Patent Advantage. One of our striking findings is China's astonishing accomplishments in patenting activities in relation to renewable energies, which have surpassed those of Western technologically advanced countries since the year 2000. China is now ranked first in terms of renewable patenting activities, demonstrating China's ambition in leading not only the production power house of the world but also that it is a pioneer in global renewable energy technologies.

This study examines the causes of developing a wireless city, with Singapore and Taipei taken as examples. The examination is extended to include consideration of how the factors influencing consumer usage behavior have variable impacts on the development of wireless cities with diverse resource bases. The empirical results show that the internal and external influencing factors are related to each other and to the innovation adoption intentions during the development of a wireless city. From the cases of Singapore and Taipei, it is evident that the factors influencing innovation adoption intentions have varying impacts on the development of a wireless city given the diverse resource bases available.