Innovation, capital and market capture

摘要

From the beginning of management of technology, technological innovation has always been thought of as consisting of two concepts — invention and commercialization. And this definition of technological innovation does capture the short-term history of innovation and industrial competition but not the long term history. In the early history of any new radical technology and new industry built upon it as a core technology, the two ideas capture that early part — but not the later part in what Schumpeter had called ‘creative destruction’. For example, if invention and commercialization were sufficient to capture the long-term history of the semiconductor IC chip industry, then America would still be the dominant producers of memory chips; but it is not. American firms invented and commercialized DRAMS in the 1970s; and yet they were not significant producers of these after 1981. DRAM industrial dominance passed to Japanese firms. But by 2000, market dominance was captured by Korean firms, eliminating Japanese competition, although earlier Japanese firms had eliminated American competition. How did all that happen? It is well known that, as anticipated by ‘Moores’ Law', DRAM products went through many next-generation-technology products (from 16K chips in the 1970s to 16G chips in the 2010s). At certain of these technology discontinuities, there occurred major changes in industrial dominance. How did these dominant industrial shifts occur, over the long-term of technological innovation? To explain this, we add a third basic idea to the definition of ‘technological innovation’ - which is the idea of ‘market capture’. In this way, one can think not only about ‘short-term’ technological innovation (as invention + commercialization) but also about ‘long-term’ technological innovation (as invention + commercialization + market-capture). For market-capture, the ro- e of a capital structure, in addition to technology, has turned out to be a critical factor. To understand in long-term of technological innovation how precisely does capital interact with a technology-discontinuity, we review the cases of Japanese and Korean captures of the memory chip market.