Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries

Britain’s industrial revolution spawned efforts by “followers” to match and surpass the achievements of leading firms and industries in advanced nations. Two centuries later, the drive for industrial upgrading, which Nelson and Rosenberg (1993) define as “the processes by which firms master and get into practice product designs and manufacturing processes that are new to them, if not to the universe or even the nation,” continues. There is a parallel history of governmental efforts to accelerate the progress of national firms and industries toward global best practice and, upon approaching the frontier, to enter the realm of original innovation.