Research On The Path And Mechanisms Of Chinese Automotive Industry's Core Technology Breakthrough

Core technologies not only constitute an important part of firms' core competence,but also act as the key strength of a country's manufacturing industry.China has been the largest automaker and automotive market in the world since 2009.Nevertheless,China's automotive industry is still under control of multinational firms regard to the core technologies.Core technology breakthrough is still a strategic problem faced by China's automotive industry.Mainstream technology innovation and technology catch-up theories haven't conducted specialized and systematic research on core technologies.The few papers which mentioned “core technology” simply regard it as a self-evident concept and view it as a black box.As a result,there exist major research gaps about the inner structure,breakthrough path,and breakthrough mechanisms of core technologies.This study is established upon China's practical problem of lacking core technologies and focuses on the core technologies of China's automotive industry.We try to answer the following questions.Firstly,what is the inner structure of core technologies? Secondly,what is the path for core technology breakthrough? Thirdly,how to realize core technology breakthrough?This dissertation applies explorative multiple longitudinal case study,structural equation model,and patent-based Tobit regression to analyze the above research questions.Three major findings are obtained.Firstly,a core technology can be dissembled into three units,including Functionality Core Technology(FCT),Performance Core Technology(PCT),and Reliability Core Technology(RCT).Their corresponding technological problems' complexity and technological objects' maturity rise in turn.Secondly,FCT,PCT,and RCT act as three “checkpoints” for core technology breakthrough.The breakthrough path is from FCT to PCT to RCT.Thirdly,the breakthrough mechanisms of the three core technology units are different.Specifically,breakthrough of FCT and PCT are realized through first reverse learning then forward learning;breakthrough of RCT is realized through continuous forward learning.In addition to firms,universities may be major actors for Chinese automotive industry's core technology breakthrough,playing dominant roles in FCT breakthrough and auxiliary roles in PCT breakthrough.This study has three innovation points.Firstly,it analyzes core technologies from a micro and evolutionary perspective and establishes a core technology inner structure model consisting of FCT,PCT,and RCT,which opens the “black box” of core technologies and surpasses the static and superficial analysis of core technologies' physical structure in existing literature.Secondly,this study unveils the path for core technology breakthrough and the breakthrough mechanisms for each core technology unit.In particular,the breakthrough of RCT can only be reached through continuous forward learning rather than imitation or reverse engineering.This finding is different from the central viewpoint of “from imitation to innovation” in mainstream catch-up theories.It has guiding significance for core technology breakthrough of automotive industry and even manufacturing industry in China.Thirdly,this study finds that universities also acts as major actors in addition to firms for core technology breakthrough.The functions of firms and universities in core technology breakthrough are differentiated,which breaks the existing technology catch-up and core technology literature's limitation of only focusing on firms.