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.
John A. Mathews is Eni Chair of Competitive Dynamics and Global Strategy at LUISS Guido Carli University, in Rome, where he teaches International Business. Prior to taking up this position in September 2009, he was Professor of Strategic Management at Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University in Sydney, where he has taught graduate MBA classes for the past decade. He is the author of several books including Strategizing, Disequilibrium and Profit (Stanford University Press, 2006), Dragon Multinational: A New Model of Global Growth (Oxford University Press, 2002), Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2000), this latter appearing in a Chinese translation published by Peking University Press, in August 2009. As a specialist in industrial dynamics, technology and innovation, Professor Mathews has become deeply interested in the renewable energy industries and low-carbon technologies and prospects for speeding up their introduction as the primary means of dealing with global warming. He has a particular interest in biofuels industries and biochar, and is publishing on these industries, particularly on the prospects for developing countries, in such leading journals as Energy Policy and BioFPR. Professor Mathews has worked internationally with UNCTAD, UNIDO and with the World Bank, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Rockefellar Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, in Italy, in September 2004. He has addressed several conferences on energy and biofuels, and in November 2008 was a keynote speaker at the World Ethanol Conference in Paris. In 2007 he won the support of the Rockefeller Foundation to stage a weeklong conference on global issues in biofuels, which took place at the Foundation's Bellagio conference center in March 2008.
