关键词: 工程师主导型企业, 情景特定知识, 复杂产品系统, 全球生产网络, 自主创新

Abstract:

China has caught up with and even surpassed some developed countries in the industrial sector of complex product systems in the past 20 years. This has challenged the popular view that enterprises in developing countries could never achieve technological catch-up given the high technical complexity and high organization and coordination requirements in the field. Moreover, China has not used global product networks that once helped western enterprises gain and maintain their leading edge in the field of complex product systems and became the dominate multi-national company pattern. Instead, local Chinese enterprises have adopted a pattern of engineer-centered enterprises. This article explores the growth path and sources of competitiveness of engineer-centered enterprises and finds that: with the “home-front” system, engineer-centered enterprises send engineering teams to local markets, acquire context-based knowledge through interactions with local users, and establish communications between the front line and formal R&D forces at the headquarters, which helps effectively respond to the problems and demands emerging in application scenarios, and promote organizational learning and technological capabilities. The “home-front” system is enabled by a set of organizational conditions. First, enterprises need to acquire enough high-quality engineers and organize them organically. Second, enterprises need to give engineers the leading power in strategic decision-making to ensure the long-term commitment to technical competence rather than utilitarianism and short-term profit. At the same time, only by fully empowering front-line engineers can resource allocation serve the identification and solution of technical problems in practice more effectively, and promote the formation of context-based knowledge. Third, enterprises need to develop a learning organization with high integration, and encourage collectivism and collaboration to the maximum extent in the core system and incentive mechanism. This helps promote collective learning and enables enterprises to effectively acquire and apply context-based knowledge. This article develops the theory of multinational corporations and the theory of complex product system, and provides inspiration for improving technological capabilities of enterprises through R&D-oriented corporate governance, and building a technological innovation system with enterprises as the main body, markets as the guidance and deep integration of industry, research and application.

Key words: engineer-centered enterprise, context-based knowledge, complex product system, global production network, indigenous innovation