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Public Policy Professor Don Kash is studying the evolution of technology in thirteen cases from Japan, the U.S., Germany, China and India. The study's objective is to understand whether different national cultures affect the way complex technologies evolve.
"The data on trade indicates that some countries are good at carrying out the innovation of technologies because of factors such as public policy, the availability of capital or human resources," said Kash. "But we really think there national culture plays a role."
Professor Kash and his team have looked at technological advancement in terms of such cultural factors as hierarchical structure, the culture's comfort with tactic knowledge and codified knowledge, its decision making process and how strongly it encourages risk taking. Through research and country visits they are working to understand how technology develops by tracing the co-evolution of the organizations that carry out the technological innovations and the technologies themselves.
For example, the three India case studies involve software companies: TATA Consultancy Services, INFOSYS and Bosch. With Bosch, the researchers looked at the development of a diesel fuel injection system and they tried to follow the development of the systems over time to see how innovation occurred.
Professor
Kash has been working on this part of the project for about two and a
half years, but the study's beginnings came from research for a book he
co-wrote with George Washington University's Dr. Robert Rycroft called
The Complexity Challenge: Technological Innovation for the 21st Century.
The book utilized ideas from complexity studies, which theorizes that
people today deal with systems in which it is impossible to understand
cause and effect. The assumption underpinning this work is that the ability
to create and continually improve complex technologies has fundamentally
changed the character of society, the management of the public and private
sector, and public policy making.
"We believe technology has become one of the most important causal factors in society, and so we tried to understand how innovation occurs," said Kash.
For the study Kash tried to
find countries in various stages of development with cultures distinguishable
from each other. The research funding came from the National Science Foundation
and North Carolina State University's Center for Innovation Management
Studies.