追赶视角下复杂产品的复杂性及其突破机制

The mechanisms to tackle the complexity of complex products and systems:From the catch-up perspective

从后发者追赶的角度深入挖掘复杂产品的复杂性内涵,并构建更为全面的复杂性突破机制框架,对后发企业突破复杂性制约和实现追赶具有重要意义。首先,基于现有文献梳理了复杂产品的复杂性概念及复杂产品追赶的特殊性,剖析了现有研究的不足。其次,聚焦高速列车追赶,基于44人次的半结构化访谈数据和5类二手数据,采用嵌入式案例研究方法分析了后发企业追赶过程面临的复杂性以及相应的突破机制。研究发现:在后发企业追赶视角下,复杂产品的复杂性来源于技术因素和市场因素两个方面,复杂产品的知识基础包括广度和深度两个方面,因此复杂性来源和知识基础两个维度交叉形成了技术广度、技术深度、市场广度和市场深度四类复杂性,而后发企业突破这些复杂性的机制分别是吸收、渗透、重构和分解。最后,讨论了后发企业追赶过程中复杂性的形成与突破的理论机制。本文的研究结论为后发企业实现复杂产品的突破提供了重要见解。

Catch-up literature investigates latecomers closing the gaps to incumbents.Recent examples show that some developing countries,such as China,the largest developing countries successfully caught up with developed economies in mass production and some parts of complex products and systems(CoPS).However,the discrepancy of CoPS between China and leading developed economies remains salient.More importantly,established studies mainly focus on the Chinese latecomer CoPS firms in implementing catch-up strategy,while keeping the mechanisms to tackle the CoPS largely ignored.In addition,previous studies on such mechanisms failed to reach a consensus on sequential or simultaneous paradigms.To fill in the above-mentioned research gaps and considering the important practical significance of the CoPS,this study focuses on the concept of the CoPS complexity and investigate the catch-up of latecomers in China to better understand the nature of CoPS,followed by developing a holistic theoretical framework of mechanisms to tackle the CoPS.We choose the catch-up of China’s high-speed rail as our research context and conduct an embedded case study.Specifically,we select the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation(CRRC)as our primary unit of analysis(including their subordinate train integration enterprises and key parts supporting enterprises under the CRRC group),followed by the key actors in the industry as the secondary unit of analysis(including government agencies,research institutes,and universities,etc.).We conducted 44 semi-structured interviews in two phases from March 2016 to August 2018.The informants are mainly technical/manufacturing department managers of companies affiliated with the CRRC or managers and senior engineers of other railway equipment manufacturers.In addition,we collected five types of secondary data,including the annual reports of CRRC and those of other enterprises,industrial policy documents,industry research reports,relevant monographs and news reports.Our multi-source of data allows us to triangulate the data to ensure the reliability of the results.We utilize the content analysis to analyze the data obtained.Our findings show that for the catch-up of CoPS latecomers,the interaction of the two dimensions of the source of complexity and the knowledge base formed four types of complexity,namely technological breadth,technological depth,market breadth and market depth.And the mechanisms utilized by the latecomers to tackle these complexities are absorption,percolation,reconfiguration,and decomposition respectively.First,technological breadth complexity mainly results from the technological and knowledge diversity.Latecomers can expand the scope oftheir knowledge space by absorbing external knowledge and linking it to existing internal knowledge.Second,technological depth complexity is often due to latecomers’lack of capability to acquire deep knowledge.Latecomers can gradually find the path from superficial knowledge to deep knowledge through local innovation search,which is what we call"percolation".Third,the complexity of market breadth is related to the diversity of markets,including the diversity of geographical environments and the diversity of product standards across countries.The latter can connect and recombine internal knowledge from different fields through long-distance search,forming a long-distance reconfiguration.Fourth,due to the specificity of CoPS,quite often,latecomers enter some specific market segments by alliances,which leads to the creation of deep market complexity.In this case,the firm with dominant position in the alliance can decompose the complex tasks and resources so as to adapt to the needs of the market segment.This study contributes to the catch-up literature in two ways.On one hand,this study enriches the research of catch-up mechanisms of latecomer firms in CoPS.Focusing on the latecomer catch-up,this paper unboxes the complexity of CoPS followed by the mechanism to cope with such complexity from two dimensions:the source of complexity and the knowledge base,which provides a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of CoPS and its tackle mechanism.In addition,this study responds to the call of deepening the research on the inner structure and implicit inner laws of core technologies of CoPS.On the other hand,this study illustrates the mechanisms to tackle the complexity of CoPS,which partially explains the paradox of sequential and simultaneous patterns coping with the complexity of the CoPS.We take a holistic view of the complexity,consisted of the divergent combinations of the technology and market as well as the latecomers’knowledge base.Doing so further helps us to develop an integrated theoretical framework to understand the mechanisms to tackle the complexity.Our framework provides new insights on latecomers’catch-up in the areas of CoPS.We argue that the sequential pattern of tackling the CoPS is due to the different orders of complexity emerged in the process of latecomers’catch-up,while the simultaneous pattern of coping with the CoPS is because of latecomers’local search for knowledge reaches the critical value of the percolation during the catch-up process.