Mei Liang: How Enterprising Governments Benefit Industrial Innovation
May 10-2024
At the Academic Afternoon Tea on May 6, Mei Liang, NSD Associate Research Fellow, illustrated the concrete ways in which governments exert impact on innovation. The event comprises serial lectures with the aim of promoting cross-disciplinary exchanges among NSD faculty members and students.
Since its enshrinement in the documents of the 18th CCP National Congress, innovation has become ever more prominent in policy making. The first guideline in the 2024 Government Work Report focuses on fully harnessing the dominant role of innovation and using technological innovation to catalyze industrial innovation.
Mei Liang started with a systematic introduction of literature development and knowledge basis in innovation research, as well as leading institutions and researchers in the field. He then traced governments’ role in innovation to US President F.D. Roosevelt’s 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier, which set the course for the country’s purposeful and organized investment in basic research and the establishment of such agencies as NSF and NIH. Task-oriented research further flourished in the US, with the founding of DARPA as an example, after the former Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, in 1957. In terms of theoretical development, Christopher Freeman, Bengt-Ake Lundvall, and Richard Nelson led pioneering research on ‘national innovation system’ at around 1990s, incorporating state perspectives and government entities into theoretical discourse on innovation research.
Further zooming in on his lecture topic, Mei Liang used the theoretical perspectives of Open Innovation to distill research questions: What roles do governments play in industrial development? How do these roles affect industries’ open innovation so that their competitiveness is enhanced? He said that classical open innovation theories are beset with four defects, notably inadequate attention to government policy-making entities.
Governments’ prominent role in innovation is evidenced by practices in developed countries (like NASA and DARPA) and emerging economies (the east Asian miracle), as well as in transnational scenarios (the Human Genome Project and the International Space Station). Mei Liang also noted that governments’ role can take on dynamic changes in accordance with industrial development.
In the case of China’s high-speed rail, Mei Liang referred to neo-institutional literature on state political systems to sum up four roles played by the government during the industry’s dynamic evolution: Commander, Cultivator, Protector, and Intermediator. At different development phase of the industry, selected roles were combined to support the industry’s progression and competitive upgrade. He then extended to how the government has made a difference in airliner manufacturing, semiconductors, and new energy cars and delved into the switch and coordination between government-driven innovation system and corporations’ mainstay position in technological innovation.
He wrapped up the lecture by setting forth his future research questions: Which industries require government support? What are the boundary conditions for an ‘enterprising government’ in the evolution of industrial innovation? How can theoretical conceptualization be achieved with regard to ‘enterprising government’ in global contexts? The event ended with lively discussions on the applicability of China’s experiences in high-speed rail, short-and long-term results of industrial policy, and essence of innovation.
