multinational firms and technology transfer

CONTINUANCE

Technology Transfer with Competitive Markets in the South

Abstract

This paper develops a model of technology transfer in an environment where Þrms in developing countries are unable to recover the costs of imitation and adaptation, because a competitive market structure in the South rules out any monopoly rents accruing to Southern Þrms. In such an environment, the technology transfer must be initiated by a Northern Þrm which risks its technology being copied widely throughout the South because of lower production costs in the South and because its markets in the North are protected by strong intellectual property rights or by natural means. Examples of tech- nology transfer under such an environment include subcontracting by Northern Þrms to Þrms in the South and the adaptation of .freely observable. technologies that are difficult to keep proprietary without strong intellectual property rights protection. The results of the paper suggest (in contrast to the previous work) that in such an environ- ment, developing countries do not experience the endogenous increase in their relative

wages by accumulating factors of production. While improvements in the productivity of the technology transfer process can restore the endogenous increase in relative wages from accumulation over some range, continued accumulation will eventually cause the relative wage of the South to fall. This provides us with a possible explanation for why some developing countries have been unable to sustain the high rates of factor accumulation that we have observed in the East Asian miracle economies.

Technology transfer revisited from the perspective of the

Abstract

This contribution proposes a revised framework for understanding and analyzing the process of technology transfer in theperspective of the knowledge-based economy (KBE). The underlying hypothesis is that the context of the knowledge-based economy introduces a major shift in the way technology transfer is conceived. The traditional model of technology transfer was based on the vision of technology moving from one well-defined economic unit to another well-defined unit.We suggest that in the new perspective technology transfer is essentially considered as a specific knowledge-transfer process that depends on the ways firms and other institutions manage knowledge, in particular the co-evolution of their absorptive capabilities and their knowledge-transmission strategies. To support the theoretical analysis, we analyze the business case of Nortel Networks over the past 50 years. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Culture Conflicts in Software Engineering Technology Transfer

Abstract

Although the need to transition new technology to improve the process of developingquality software products is well understood, the computer software industry has done apoor job of carrying out that need. All too often new software technology is touted as thenext "silver bullet" to be adopted, only to fail and disappear within a very short period.New technologies are often adopted without any convincing evidence that they will beeffective, yet other technologies are ignored despite the published data that they will beuseful. Clearly there is a clash between those developing new technologies and those responsible for developing quality products. In this paper we discuss a study conducted among a large group of computer software professionals in order to understand what techniques can be used to support the introduction of new technologies, and to understand the biases and opinions of those charged with researching, developing or implementing

those new technologies. This study indicates which evaluation techniques are viewed as most successful under various conditions. We show that the research and industrial communities do indeed have different perspectives, which leads to a clash between the goals of the technology researchers and the needs of the technology users.