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Top1. Introduction
Firms in emerging economies usually face a strategic dilemma, in which they need to decide whether continuing their low-cost and imitation-based competitive strategies or becoming innovation leaders who rely on R&D (Hobday et al., 2004; Xiao et al., 2013). In recent years, some industries in emerging economies have made technological progress through technology import, absorbing, and re-innovation, and gained international competitiveness, which is heavily based on low labor cost. Although the gap between these industries in emerging economies and the corresponding ones in developed countries becomes smaller, a catch-up has never occurred. When these industries in emerging economies follow the same technological trajectory, it seems that they will never catch up with those in developed countries. As the latecomers, they must adopt technological leapfrogging to achieve a catch-up.
However, although substantial investments have been spent on R&D in emerging economies, little is known about the factors that affect firms’ decision regarding the strategic dilemma. To this end, this paper analyzes firms’ innovation strategies by investigating the relationship among technological innovation, technological trajectory transition, and firms’ innovation performance. Technological innovation is studied from the perspectives of innovation novelty and innovation openness. Two technological trajectory transitions, namely creative cumulative technological trajectory transition and creative disruptive technological trajectory transition, are examined. A structural equation model is developed and tested with data collected by surveying 366 Chinese firms.
The results indicate that both innovation novelty (Lei et al 2020; Li 2018; Yang et al 2018; Wipulanusat et al 2020) and innovation openness positively affects creative cumulative technological trajectory transition as well as creative disruptive technological trajectory transition. Innovation openness and creative disruptive technological trajectory transition positively both affect firms’ innovation performance. However, neither innovation novelty nor creative cumulative technological trajectory transition positively affects firms’ innovation performance. Based on the results, this paper discusses implications for managers and directions for future studies.