An innovation process as leapfrogging strategies in digital wireless communications industry in Korea: Catch-up and lead in digital wireless communications technologies

This paper has examined the leapfrogging strategies with the case of catch-up and lead in digital wireless communications by the Korean public institutes. Despite the disadvantages implied by the technological regime of wireless communications and the risks facing early entrants in trajectory choice and initial market formation, the Korean Public Institute had achieved a “path-creating catch-up and lead” in the sense they chose a different path from the world forerunners firms in the behalf of Korean government. Despite the lack of sufficient capability and core technical knowledge base, the Korean public institute was able to develop the digital wireless communications systems. Towards global digital communications market, the Korean targeted the national market from the beginning, and their sources for competitive advantages were the speedy catching up the digital communications for complex system like switching system at the initial stage. From the mid of 1990s, Korea was the first country in the world to develop the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) based digital mobile telecommunications system. Korea became the first to commercialize Wibro, LTE(Long Term Evolution), and LTE Advanced system for providing Wireless Broadband communications services in 2005 and 2010 respectively. As a result, Korea enjoyed no. 1 technologies in the world since the early 2000s in evolutionary wireless communications services.