This book grows out of a five-year collaborative research project undertaken by the authors in East Asia. They have worked with firms and institutions in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, to inquire into the micro-processes of firm-level organizational learning that underpin technology leverage in an industry such as semiconductors. The processes investigated are not specific to microchips, but can be seen working in one knowledge-intensive sector after another. Mathews and Cho argue that indeed these are the processes that will shape industrial evolution in the twenty-first century, not just in East Asia but in the developed world as well. Tiger Technology concludes with an important observation - that wealth can be generated just as much through management of technology diffusion as through conventional concerns with innovation, provided the institutions of leverage are carefully constructed.
