Disruptive innovation and technology ecosystem: The evolution of the intercohesive public–private collaboration network in Chinese telecommunication industry

Abstract

Recent events involving Chinese technology firm Huawei and its role in the global 5th Generation (5G) telecommunication standard, as well as the role of the Chinese government in shaping the technology competition, have pushed the issue of public–private collaboration to the headline. To offer improved understanding about this issue of profound implication for research and practice, we trace the trajectory of a previous public–private collaboration and investigates the disruption and restructure of a technology ecosystem. The standardization of China’s TD-SCDMA technology reveals that (1) a network has a more centralized structure at its inception; (2) intercohesion increases and structural folds facilitate knowledge generation and disruptive innovation in the orchestration phase; (3) in the embedded phase, the public institutions’ status generally remained stable. Essentially, the government empowers various institutions to form a strategizing group, and leads this group across the disruption and reconfiguration of the industrial network.