ABSTRACT
The fact that organizational initiators have played a predominant role in initiating NTEs points to one essential aspect of a positive restructuring process. Existing organizations have to and, as demonstrated in the study, can play an important part in the restructuring if the process proceeds with a certain degree of social consensus and participation. R&D institutions and local governments have been very active in the spin-off restructuring in China, not only in transferring accumulated technological assets but also in providing financial, regulatory and physical infrastructure, as well as socio-political support. Since the institutions to supply all kinds of necessary support are missing, the lack has to be supplied by the constituents of the existing structure, temporarily and in more or less ad hoc ways, for radical restructuring inevitably means doing things in unfamiliar ways. Incentives and the delegation of responsibility, as well as regulations to provide new rules for new games, are preconditions to achieve broad participation in restructuring. In the case of NTE development in China, these preconditions were provided by the launch of the Torch Programme and the implementation of that Programme was rooted in a decentralized decisionmaking structure. The results of the wide, and indeed vast, participation in institutional experiments for spinoff restructuring are also visible: the birth of new business establishments (NTEs), the development of various kinds of regulatory institutions which are growing beyond the temporary and ad hoc stage, and the transformation of many of the existing state-owned R&D institutes themselves (which will be examined in Part 3).
