Organizational Learning of Emerging Economy Firms : The Case of China's TCL Group

Traditionally, technology intensive industries such as electronics, information technology and pharmaceuticals have been dominated by firms from the U.S., Europe and Japan. Of late, there has been a shift in this triad dominance — firms from emerging economies, such as TATA of India, BYD of China, and Samsung Electronics of Korea, have become prominent players in some of these industries, with substantial market shares. In fact, emerging economy firms represented 35 percent of the world's top 100 best performing technology companies according to Bloomberg-Business Week's 2009 ranking. Of these, BYD and Tencent Holdings of China and TATA and Infosys Technologies of India were in the top 10. Most of these firms were late to enter their target industries, and began far behind the incumbents in terms of their technological capabilities. The emergence of these firms challenges conventional wisdom on entry timing and resource-based competence. Given their lack of rare, imperfectly imitable, valuable and sustainable resources, how did these technology-deficient emerging economy firms gain a foothold in technology intensive industries already dominated by resource-rich multinational incumbents?