【与大师对话】系列讲座（NO.2）

2022-07-10

【与大师对话】系列讲座（NO.2）

Disruption, Innovation & Supply Chain Resilience

Time: November 25 2022

15:45-18:15 pm (Beijing time)

08:45-11:45pm (Amsterdam time)

After decennia of increasing integration of the world’s economies, the past few years have witnessed a number of disruptions to the globalized production systems. Pandemic, war and political conflicts have exposed vulnerabilities that decision makers in governments as well as private firms have neglected for too long. The result is stagnation of production, inflation, and possibly an economic crisis in large parts of the world. According to some predictions we will enter an epoch of de-globalization, with far-reaching consequences throughout value chains. In this workshop we will discuss two fields that are, and arguably will remain in the focus of attention: supply chains and innovation systems, with a special focus on China and the West.

Supply chains have become fragmented and stretched out over the globe, as companies search for the optimal location of different types of activities. Now new equilibria between cost minimization and risk need to be found, leading to re-shoring of activities on the side of Western firms, and a drive to move further up the value chain in China. How will this play out in the future, and what will be the consequences for economic and social welfare?

Innovation benefits from a free flow of ideas, but the trend is for countries to become more hidebound and to construct obstacles to knowledge exchange, at the level of academic research, company R&D, and knowledge embodied in certain products. What will this mean for the innovation systems in China and in the West, and how can international knowledge exchange be safeguarded in the future?

The Speakers

TOPIC: Resilient Supply Chains in an Uncertain World

Jan C. Fransoo，Professor of Operations and Logistics Management，Tilburg University

Supply chain resilience has been an active topic of research and of high industry importance ever since the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. In operations research, primary attention has been focused on diversification in sourcing (dual sourcing), while in management research, much attention has been placed on relationship and on rapid recover (time to recover). All of this has been based on disruption that have a relatively short duration. Post-covid, we however see more and more disruptions that actual like structural shifts of long duration. This fundamentally changes the tradeoffs that we are facing. I will briefly review this development and outline opportunities for research.

TOPIC:Decoding the Rise of Chinese Manufacturing: Why the Continuity of Catch-up Ladders Ultimately Matters

Bin Guo，Professor of Innovation Management and Strategy，Zhejiang University

The rise of Made-in-China has been widely attributed to low labor cost advantage and imitation advantage as a latecomer. However, as these two advantages are nearly inborn to all late-developing countries, they cannot be regarded as the key factors to drive the rapid growth of China’s manufacturing industry, or China’s economy, over the past years. Thus, I proposed a theory to explain the rise of Chinese manufacturing, which highlights the importance of the continuity of catch-up ladders in terms of capabilities, technology and market positioning. The continuity of the catch-up ladder will greatly determine the catch-up efficiency of an industry and even a country at large. Such a perspective is more applicable to large emerging economies, especially those with over one hundred million population and thus huge potential domestic market demand.

TOPIC:China’s Innovation Capabilities in a Fragmented World

Bruce McKern，Adjunct Professor of International Business，University of Technology Sydney

In recent years the dense network of trade and direct investment interconnections between nations has begun to fragment, under the pressure of tensions between the major powers. As a result, corporations and governments are turning their attention to their future technological capabilities and, in particular, to domestic innovation. Nowhere is this shift of focus more intense than in China, which has the expressed goal of becoming an advanced global manufacturing power by 2049. Trade tensions with other countries and a more assertive foreign policy have combined to give greater urgency to China’s goals, while raising these issues to prominence globally. In this session, I will discuss China’s recent path to becoming a technologically sophisticated power, the advances in basic and applied research that have contributed to its success in innovation, its relative position today in advanced technological capabilities, and its prospects for achieving its goals over the next 25 years.

IMPORTANT INFO.

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In an online meeting with many participants it is important to apply some ground rules:

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(2) Please leave on your camera, if possible, as this creates a better working atmosphere.

(3) If during a discussion session you wish to say something, please first send a brief chat message.

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