GEVACCON · Geographies of Value Chain Construction in Emerging Complex Technologies: A Compparative Study of the Electric Vehicle Lithium-ion Battery Industry in China and Germany

Geographies of Value Chain Construction in Emerging Complex Technologies: A Compparative Study of the Electric Vehicle Lithium-ion Battery Industry in China and Germany

The Geographies of Value Chain Construction in Emerging Complex Industries (GEVACCON) proposal dealt with central success conditions in the emerging global innovation races. We are currently witnessing accelerating shifts of global leadership in many emerging industries, fueled by increasing digitalization and globalization, as well as pressing concerns about grand socio-ecological challenges. GEVACCON maintains that the challenge for gaining industrial leadership is to manage innovation in emerging complex industries. By this, I refer to new industries that consist of complex relationships regarding technological, geographical and governance characteristics (Figure 1). (1) Technologically, the complexity lies in the fact that different segments of the technology value chains are increasingly interrelated (for illustrative cases, see Malhotra et al., 2019 ). Changes in one segment require adjustments in other segments and induce reconfigurations of the whole technology value chain. Moreover, for each segment, multiple technological alternatives exist. Depending on cost, efficiency, and capability considerations, permutations of these options add to the overall complexity of innovation management. (2) Complexity is also added regarding the geographical configuration of the sectors that are connected by the technology value chains, as different resources (material, human, finance, etc.) have to be created in or sourced from different parts of the world. Therefore, actors, resources and institutions need to be coordinated strategically at regional, national, supranational and global levels. (3) Finally, these complexities need to be coordinated in new polycentric governance arrangements among the increasing diversity of actors in the value networks or innovation systems. In contrast to conventional industries, where linear value chain governance modes prevail, the value capture activities in emerging complex industries ask for more network-like or systemic thinking. Given these three dimensions of complexity in innovation management and value chain construction, new capabilities, regulations, and collaboration cultures have to be built-up by a diversity of stakeholders. The extant literature on innovation and industry dynamics is poorly prepared to deal with the increasing complexity of emerging industries in the above-mentioned three dimensions, and hence offers little insight to actors who want to gain leadership in the emerging global innovation races. The overarching motivation of GEVACCON was therefore to investigate the newly emerging geographies of value chain construction in emerging complex industries. Specifically, I aimed to deconstruct the elements of the emerging industries along their technology value chains, and investigated in detail the geographical configurations of sectors that are interrelated by the multi-component technologies, as well as the new polycentric governance modes of the value networks and/or innovation systems in space.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз