Secondary Innovation: The Experience of Chinese Enterprises in Learning, Innovation and Capability Building

Abstract

Nowadays enterprises have played an important role in China’s economic development and increasingly become the main force of China’s growing research and innovation activities. Different from some related work on developing countries’ innovation policy and strategy, the evolutionary model of secondary innovation, based on Chinese enterprises’ innovation practice, highlights the significant role of enterprises in systems of capability building and innovation, and opens the black box to uncover the dynamic process of enterprises’ organizational learning, knowledge accumulation and capability building. Moreover, since enterprises are considered as open systems and one important job of organizational learning is to address rapidly changing environments, interactions between systems of innovation inside and outside the enterprises are also highlighted in the model. In a word, the secondary innovation model provides a useful analytical framework for better understanding the micro-level systems of learning, innovation and capability building in developing countries.