The role of technological trajectories in catching-up-based development: An application to energy efficiency technologies
Sheng Zhong & Bart Verspagen
#2016-013
We argue that the analysis level of a technological trajectory is very
suitable to analyse the decisions of firms in latecomer countries with
regard to the technological area that they should focus on.
Technological trajectories are the main focal points along which
technological innovation develops, and they are more detailed than the
common sectors, like electronics of pharmaceuticals, that are used in
the analysis of catching-up based growth. We present a collection of
methods that has been proposed in the literature to identify
technological trajectories. These methods use patent citation networks,
and are applied to two separate fields in energy efficiency
technologies. We identify the relevant technological trajectories, and
analyse how the main countries active in these fields can be classified
as either latecomer or incumbent countries. We then present a measure
for how much patents from a particular country contribute to the main
technological trajectories in the field, and to what extent they are
derived from these trajectories. We use an explorative regression model
to establish that latecomer countries tend to contribute to a lesser
extent than incumbents to the main technological trajectories in the
fields we investigate.
Keywords: technological trajectories, patent citation networks,
latecomer innovation strategy
JEL Classification: O31, O33, O47