Korea’s rapid growth in TFT-LCD and the spillover of technological capability cross-industry.docx

Korea’s rapid growth in TFT-LCD and the spillover of technological capability cross-industry (DRAM and TFT-LCD)Tae-Young Park, Jae-Yong ChoungCenter for Technology and Innovation Policy (CTIP), ICU, Daejeon, KOREA Pa0616@icu.ac.kr, jychoung@icu.ac.krAbstract Although Korea’s growth in the TFT-LCD industry has been surprisingly rapid, there are only a few studies on the reasons behind the country’s success in this area. Most of these studies lack views on technological innovation or have the limitation of expanding the concept of knowledge spillover among industries related technically into all areas but production. Fist of all, we prove the relatedness of technology between TFT-LCD and DRAM. We investigate the mechanism of DRAM’s technological capability transfer into TFT-LCD from three points of view: technology, human resources/organization and network. We find that DRAM’s technological capability transferred into TFT-LCD mainly in the shape of capital powe??, semiconductor technology required for TFT-LCD RD, production and quality management systems, key labor movements, and organizational systems. However, there is almost no spillover in technology transfer and global and supplier network. 1. Introduction Korea’s growth in the TFT-LCD industry has been surprisingly rapid in that Korean firms, starting in 1995, recorded the largest world market share in only 3 years. However, there are only a few studies on the reasons for Korea’s success in this area. Most researches lack views on technological innovation or have the limitation of expanding the concept of knowledge spillover among industries related technically into all areas but production. We start from the idea (Choung and Hwang, 2003; Park et al., 2003) that TFT-LCD and DRAM are technically very much related. The high relatedness of technology between the two industries means that knowledge accumulated in an existing industry, DRAM, can spill over into a new industry, TFT-LCD, very quickly (Choung and Hwang,