Download pdf
Learning from Competitors: Evidence from the Movie Industry
- 1 Williston Northampton School
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
As an entertainment medium, movies are closely related to everyone's daily life. Using film industry data can help understanding how a country's industry develops and progresses. It is widely seen in many contexts that companies can learn from competitors to improve quality and adopt technology. This project uses detailed film production data to understand the upgrading process of China's film industry over the past decade. The study finds that foreign filmmakers produce significantly more feature films. Feature films are a special type of film that are more technical and require large visual teams. It finds that foreign films have more visual team members than domestic ones. It shows that domestic film productions catch up by hiring foreign visual team members. It is illustrated that how strategically hiring foreign experts promotes domestic industry upgrading and technological knowledge transfer. Film industry data provide unique insights into these human resource channels to narrow the capability gap between domestic and foreign producers. These results provide insights into the channels behind industry upgrading.
Keywords
Quality upgrading, knowledge transmission, learning from others
[1]. Hobday, M. (1995). "East Asian latecomer firms: Learning the technology of electronics." World development 23(7): 1171-1193.
[2]. Hobday, M. (2003). "Innovation in Asian industrialization: A Gerschenkronian perspective." Oxford Development Studies 31(3): 293-314.
[3]. Kim, W., Shi, Y., & Gregory, M. (2004). Transition from imitation to innovation: lesions from a Korean multinational corporation. International Journal of Business. 9(4)
[4]. Lee, K. (2005). "Making a technological catch-up: Barriers and opportunities." Asian Journal of Technology Innovation 13(2): 97-131.
[5]. Pack, H. and K. Saggi (1997). "Inflows of foreign technology and indigenous technological development." Review of development economics 1(1): 81-98.
[6]. Saxenian, A. (2002). "Transnational communities and the evolution of global production networks: The cases of Taiwan, China and India." Industry and innovation 9(3): 183-202.
[7]. Liu, X., et al. (2010). "Returnee entrepreneurs and firm performance in Chinese high-technology industries." Journal of International Business Studies 41(4): 633-648.
[8]. Almeida, P. and B. Kogut (1999). "Localization of knowledge and the mobility of engineers in regional networks." Management science 45(7): 905-917.
[9]. Ernst, D. and L. Kim (2002). "Global production networks, knowledge diffusion, and local capability formation." Research policy 31(8-9): 1417-1429.
[10]. Fu, X., Pang, Y., & Zhu, C. (2013). "Indigenous and foreign innovation efforts and drivers of technological upgrading: Evidence from China". World Development, 46, 53-65.
[11]. McKenzie, J. (2012). "The economics of movies: A literature survey." Journal of Economic Surveys 26(1): 42-70.
[12]. Awate, S., Larsen, M. M., & Mudambi, R. (2015). "Accessing vs sourcing knowledge: A comparative study of R&D internationalization between emerging and advanced economy firms". Journal of International Business Studies, 46(1), 63-86.
Cite this article
Zhang,C. (2024). Learning from Competitors: Evidence from the Movie Industry. Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media,52,235-245.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Education Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).