Cultivate a creative cognitive model and achieve leapfrog catch-up in disruptive technological tracks

Research Background

The term "disruptive technology" was included in China's "National Innovation Driven Development Strategy Outline" and "13th Five Year Plan for National Science and Technology Innovation" in 2016. In the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2017, it was proposed to expand the implementation of major national science and technology projects, highlight key common technologies, cutting-edge leading technologies, modern engineering technologies, and disruptive technological innovations, and provide strong support for building a strong country in science and technology, quality, space, network, transportation, digital China, and smart society. In 2022, the government work report further pointed out that "promoting technological innovation, promoting industrial optimization and upgrading, breaking through supply constraints and bottlenecks, and relying on innovation to improve development quality". In this context, promoting the leapfrog development of Chinese enterprises through disruptive innovation is an important lever for promoting industrial optimization and upgrading, and deeply implementing the innovation driven development strategy. China has achieved rapid catch-up with international leading enterprises in many industries, but there are still technological bottlenecks in some areas. The effective way to solve this problem is to achieve leapfrog catch-up with international leading enterprises through disruptive innovation.

The rapid development of emerging industries provides excellent opportunities for Chinese enterprises to carry out disruptive innovation through technological and market opportunities. However, innovation practices in many industries have shown that even when faced with the same window of opportunity, some companies can seize the opportunity to successfully launch disruptive innovations and become industry leaders; Some companies, howeverMissed the opportunity window and was locked onto the traditional technological track. The reason for this phenomenon is that different enterprises make differentiated cognitive judgments when facing opportunity windows, leading to different innovation strategic decisions. Therefore, from the perspective of management cognition, it is of great significance to explore why different enterprises make different cognitive judgments when facing the same opportunity window, and how different management cognitive models guide enterprises to adopt differentiated innovation and catch-up paths。

Research finds

Zhou Jianghua, Li Jizhen, and Liu Zijun published a paper titled "Management Cognitive Models and Innovation catch-up Path Selection under Dual Opportunity Windows: A Case Study of Later Developing Enterprises in China's Wind Power Industry" in the third issue of China Industrial Economy in 2022. Based on the perspective of management cognition, this paper explores how enterprises form different management cognitive models when facing the dual opportunity windows of market and technology in China's wind power industry, and how different management cognitive models guide enterprises to choose different innovation catch-up strategies. Research has found that:

Firstly, in emerging industries, the structural mismatch between foreign technology and domestic demand provides a market opportunity window for Chinese local enterprises to achieve leapfrog development through architectural innovation. Later developing enterprises will use their own cognitive models to achieve innovation catch-up through different paths.

Secondly, when facing the opportunity window of technological track transformation, different technological experiences will help enterprises form different cognitive patterns and choose different technological tracks. Specifically, applied technology experience helps enterprises form an adaptive cognitive model, which in turn guides them to choose traditional technology tracks for innovation and catch-up; Research based technological experience helps enterprises form a creative cognitive model, which in turn guides them to choose disruptive technological track architecture innovation.

Once again, when facing the dual opportunity window of market and technology, the creative cognitive model guides enterprises to seize both the market and technology opportunity windows, carry out architectural innovation on the disruptive technology track, and promote synchronous exploratory learning and innovation at the level of technical principles and key components, achieving comprehensive mastery of new technologies on the disruptive technology track; The adaptive cognitive model guides enterprises to carry out architectural innovation on the traditional technology track based on market opportunity windows. At the same time, it guides enterprises to adaptively improve, iterate, and optimize mature technologies, making it difficult to achieve key breakthroughs in basic technological principles.

Overall, innovation on disruptive technology tracks can help companies gain sustained competitive advantage, while architectural innovation on traditional technology tracks can only bring temporary advantages.

Research implications

Firstly, enterprises should seize market and technological opportunities and achieve rapid catch-up through disruptive innovation. The coexistence of technology and market opportunity windows in emerging industries weakens the leading technological advantages of multinational enterprises and can become a key driving force for technological paradigm change, providing excellent opportunities for Chinese enterprises to innovate and catch up. Therefore, enterprises in emerging industries should actively promote the development of disruptive innovation based on their unique localized demand characteristics and the emergence of new technological paradigms, in order to seize the opportunity for rapid catch-up.

Secondly, enterprises should break through the limitations of their thinking patterns and cultivate a creative cognitive model. The creative cognitive model helps companies choose disruptive technology paths when facing technological transformations. Although traditional technological tracks can bring certain competitive advantages to enterprises in the short term, this competitive advantage will gradually weaken with market changes. To gain sustained competitive advantage, enterprises should be vigilant about the lock-in effect of applied technology experience on cognitive patterns, choose disruptive technology tracks for architecture innovation and basic technology innovation, and achieve a comprehensive grasp of disruptive innovation.

Thirdly, the government can promote disruptive innovation in enterprises from two aspects. On the one hand, the government can guide enterprises to break their dependence on traditional technological tracks through policy formulation, cultivate innovative cognitive models in enterprises, and make them attach importance to disruptive technological tracks, thereby guiding enterprises to engage in disruptive innovation; On the other hand, as disruptive innovation often occurs during unstable periods where market and technological opportunity windows coexist, the government can strive to break the stability of the market structure, provide opportunities for the development of disruptive innovation, and encourage enterprises to achieve leapfrog catch-up on the track of disruptive technology.

Information source: China's industrial economy