Complex Global Technological Systems and the Chinese State: From National Indigenous Innovation to Globalised Adaptive Ecology

Abstract

Rapidly accelerating technological and organisational change at the systems level is fundamentally reshaping the immediate and future socio-technological environment and facilitating new forms of geopolitical interaction, competitive advantage and systematic constraints. Indeed, a new techno-economic paradigm is emerging, and it is these new technologies that are the site for the spatial, relational and organisational transformation of the global economic system. What is so interesting and what comprises this paradigm shift is not just the ways in which these technologies will revolutionise the way human societies and economic systems interact, but the way these technologies co-evolve at a global level, and hence transcend the territorial-based behaviour and economic appropriation models of both the individual firm and the nation state.