How Do Emerging Economy Enterprises Achieve Technological Catch-up-A Dual-Drive Model of Technological Discontinuity and Institution-driven Markets

In the studies of technological catch-up, the reasons of different technological performance between emerging economy firms and advanced economy firms has become hot topic recent years, for example, the accumulations of technological knowledge and complex international environment, and firms from emerging economy are regarded in inferior position. The interesting thing is many Chinese firms success to achieve technological catch-ups under this severe circumstance. This study tries to demonstrate a new dual-factors explaining mechanism for such phenomena. We selected 259 firms from 37 industries as our sample to do empirical research and found that technological discontinuity is positively related with technological catch-up but not significantly, both institution-driven market and the interaction between technological discontinuity and institution-driven market positively affect the catch-up performance significantly. We expected our research could provide a concrete theoretical framework for the innovative catch-up field and guidance for practices of enterprises.