The national champion in ICT standard competition: Evidence from an emerging country

Some emerging countries like China, hope to capture value from indigenous innovation through a more aggressive approach to the management of their intellectual properties, and especially toward the establishment of indigenous standards which can reflect their accumulated technological capabilities by the local leading firms in ICT industries. Some local players are not satisfied to be the followers behind the foreign multinationals. With the backing of government, these local players are already in a position to compete for core technology and hope to harvest technological development in support Of national economic and security interests. They are pursing these goals through leveraging the opportunities present by the technical cycle of the developing information technology. Through the case study of the evolution trajectory of the mobile telecommunication technology in China, we found the government continues to have a great influence on the technical direction of existing or potential mobile technology by intervening in the standard setting of the telecommunication operators. The commercialization progress of the home-grown 3G standard will be an important factor in the decision-making process by the national regulators. It is found that the emerging countries like China are trying to resolve the trade-offs between alternative technical choices of future technological standards from the political, social, and community perspectives and an analytic framework is developed here. Undoubtedly, these emerging countries will play the more proactive and significant roles in the future communication area with their great potential market. By grasping the opportunity by their technological capability the local firms want to change some of the international rules of the industry games.