Research On Technology Standard Battles In Mobile Communication Industry:the Perspective Of Institutional Entrepreneurship Theory

With globalization of economic and the evolution of technology,countries do not play a major role in technology standard battles any more.Market and enterprises gradually play an increasing important role in technology standard battles.For obtaining the advantage position of technology standards,enterprises,government departments and other actors utilize resources and take actions actively.By allocating and coordinating resources,they promote the instituion into the direction which is more conducive for their own interests.Firstly,this study is based on the relevant literature on the technology standards of mobile communication industry which is published in the top journals in the field of technology management from 1990 to 2019.The literature is from the core collection database of web of science,sorted out and divided into four theoretical perspectives of regulation theory,technology management,industrial organization and strategic management via bibliometrics.Through literature review,this study finds out that most of the existing relevant literature focuses on how enterprises are affected by external environment such as government,market and standard committees in the process of technology standard battles.At the same time,the literature that refers to how enterprises play their subjective initiative in the process of standard battles is relatively less.The perspective of institutional entrepreneurship focuses on how actors use resources to change the environment so as to meet their own interests.This perspective is especially suitable for making up the insufficiency in theoretical perspective of the existing literature of the mobile communication industry.Thus,this paper conducts the case study of TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE from the perspective of institutional entrepreneurship theory so as to figure out the process of technology development and standard battles of TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE in China's mobile communication industry.Secondly,this study reviews the core concepts of institutional entrepreneurship theory including legitimacy as well as the behavior and model of institutional entrepreneurship via analysing the background of China's 3G technology development and the challenges for Datang.Owing to the institutional entrepreneurship behaviors and strategies,Datang propelled TD-SCDMA into one of the 3G technology standards in China.This paper analyzes the process and divides it into stages.This paper selects the key events which promote the process of institutional entrepreneurship and puts forward the three-stage model of institutional entrepreneurship creatively with the relevant institutional entrepreneurship theories of other scholars as reference.The model divides the institutional entrepreneurship of Datang into three stages: the preparation stage,the dynamic change stage and the regeneration stage.Furthermore,this study verifies the three-stage model of institutional entrepreneurship by analyzing the legitimacy of TD-LTE in 4G mobile communication technology standard.Finally,the above case studies prove that the theory of institutional entrepreneurship can be applied to analyze the emergence of technology standards as special ‘institutions'.Through case analysis and model establishment,this study draws the following conclusions that:(1)the agent and context of institutional entrepreneurship affect the behavior of institutional entrepreneurs;(2)the emergence of new institutions may be the results of the joint promotion from different actors;(3)new institutions do not always represent the optimal solution of industrial efficiency,and institutional entrepreneurs are not always the biggest beneficiaries under the new institutions.On this basis,this study provides suggestions of technology standard battles for the future decision-making of the government and enterprises in the mobile communication industry.