ABSTRACT
The word ‘transition’ is a common concept used to explain what has been happening in China since the reform and opening up period that began in 1978. Technological catch-up can be seen as a process in one firm or country of reaching a level of technological sophistication which exists in another ‘frontier’ firm, country or group of countries. In a long-term historical perspective, technological catch-up can be understood to have been going on since humans started farming, wherein one civilisation became more advanced than another, and this advancement moved as a pendulum between east and west on the Eurasian continent. The innovation systems literature developed in the 1980s as a response to mainstream economic theory. Learning has been studied by a number of scholars from a range of disciplines, and there is little agreement over what it is and how it occurs.
