Indicators of development or dependency in disguise? Assessing domestic inventive capacity in South Korean and Chinese infrastructural ICT standards

  • Authors:

  • Håkon Ursin Steen

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, PO Box 1080 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

  • Venue:
  • Telecommunications Policy
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Domestic infrastructural information and communication technology (ICT) standards can be items of assertion for newly industrialised countries as they signal a capacity for breaking dependence on foreign technology and potentially drawing revenue from international export. This paper asks, with an in-depth study of a selection of recent South Korean and Chinese infrastructural ICT standards, to what degree it is warranted to correlate the production of standards with dependency-breaking technological capacity. A composite picture is found. On one side, a large portion of promoted domestic standards are creative imitations of foreign technologies with limited, if any, proportions of embedded domestic patents. This indicates a lack of capacity for challenging technological dependence. On the other side, several of the technologies studied signal emerging South Korean and Chinese capacity for embedding cutting-edge patents in infrastructural ICT standards when participating in global standardisation consortiums.