Title: Chinese Policy on Public Procurement and Innovation: a Strategic Mistake?
Speaker: Andrew Tylecote, Emeritus Professor of the Economics and Management of Technological Change, University of Sheffield.
Language: English
Time: 14:00-16:30, August 30th, 2013
Venue: Room 302, School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University
Abstract：
In this presentation I will give the main arguments of my new paper with my student Gong Shuping on ‘the strange case of government procurement in China: how not to stimulate innovation.’ It is now widely accepted that public procurement can and should play an important role in stimulating innovation in high and medium-high technology sectors. I will argue that in a developing economy such as China’s, which now exposes its firms to strong foreign competition through imports and FDI, it is particularly difficult for a new innovative firm, indeed any firm with an innovative product, to get across the ‘valley of death’ which separates the development of a prototype from success in the market: there will be foreign products, or foreign brands, which are trusted by customers and which will be preferred to a new domestic product. Government needs to take a lead in supporting such domestic firms by preferring domestic products, where they are innovative and based on domestic knowhow and IPR.
This was clearly accepted by the authors of the 2006-20 Science and Technology Strategic Plan, who put forward a system for identifying and supporting indigenous innovative products. A key element of this was to be a national list of such products. This never appeared, although some provincial and prefectural lists did, during 2009-10. The policy was abandoned completely during 2011. I speculate as to why, and argue that it has serious implications for ‘indigenous innovation’ in China, taking the example of the wind turbine sector.
Bio of Speaker：
Andrew Tylecote has a long interest in development economics and has been studying the technological development of China for more than a decade. He has twice been Visiting Professor at the Centre for Technological Innovation at Tsinghua and once Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Innovation Management at Zhejiang. He has published regularly on China since 2005, with two papers in Research Policy. His Myrdal-Prize winning book (with Francesca Visintin) on Corporate Governance, Finance and the Technological Advantage of Nations (Routledge 2008), has a chapter on China.
