Recent events involving Chinese technology firm Huawei and its role in the global 5th Generation
(5G) telecommunication standard, as well as the role of the Chinese government in shaping the
technology competition, have pushed the issue of public–private collaboration to the headline.
To offer improved understanding about this issue of profound implication for research and
practice, we trace the trajectory of a previous public–private collaboration and investigates the
disruption and restructure of a technology ecosystem. The standardization of China’s TD-SCDMA
technology reveals that (1) a network has a more centralized structure at its inception; (2) in-
tercohesion increases and structural folds facilitate knowledge generation and disruptive in-
novation in the orchestration phase; (3) in the embedded phase, the public institutions’ status
generally remained stable. Essentially, the government empowers various institutions to form a
strategizing group, and leads this group across the disruption and reconfiguration of the in-
dustrial network.
By
Justin Tana, Liang Wang, Hongjuan Zhang, Wan Lie