Tiger Technology: The Creation of a Semiconductor Industry in East Asia

Cambridge Asia-Pacific Studies

by John A. Mathews, Dong-Sung Cho

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.

Genres: Technology, Asia

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2000

Reviews

[Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written in the early 2000s. Currently, Taiwan leads the world in logic chip technology, and Korea leads in technology for memory chips.

Upon approaching this book, I encountered a theme inside that's common in the political science literature: since Asia developed later than the West, they don't have to innovate; they can just catch up (or, in more unsavory versions of this trope, steal, copy, and cheat). After digging further in the book, I was like, "Whoa, these guys sure know a lot about business management." Then I found out that this is actually a business book, not a political science one.

This work is about how the Asian "tigers" were able to acquire the most advanced semiconductor technologies. The authors call this "leverage." Korea and Taiwan licensed them from American and Japanese firms before learning it themselves. Singapore brought in multinational corporations and had them train locals and source supplies locally. Some of those suppliers eventually took part in the semiconductor manufacturing process themselves. Malaysia did the same as Singapore, although Malaysia wasn't as successful due lack of "institutional capacity," i.e., the Malaysian government is more corrupt.

The core chapters about Korea and Taiwan were highly descriptive, which made it as boring as it was reassuring that the authors were being objective and not trying to pigeonhole facts into their thesis. The final three chapters that discuss how the research relates to theories of "catch up," were the most interesting.

This book aged fairly well. The exception was that it focused too much on DRAM as the main thing, the bulk of the semiconductor market at the time. Now, processors are the main thing.

[Doug O'laughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing information but hard to read and extremely academic framing.

[Sridhar Jammalamadaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for those who want to know the history of semiconductor industry evolution in East Asia.