Research about the influence of different product areas upon innovation and inter-firm competition in solar energy industry

在DVD播放器、液晶显示器和液晶电视等电子行业，许多日本领先的制造企业未能从他们发起的创新中获得巨大回报。关于这一问题的研究已经积累了许多有价值的成果。太阳能电池行业被认为是这样的一个例子，并受到强烈怀疑。虽然现有的研究大多集中在一个特定的产品或技术领域，并对其进行了详细的分析，但太阳能电池行业与半导体等其他产品有很强的技术相关性，我们需要考虑到不同的产品可以共享相同的技术，或者一个产品领域使用另一个产品领域的技术。本文从横向的角度对太阳能电池产业进行了探索性研究，建立了一个分析企业创新与竞争的框架。

In electronics industries such as DVD players, LCD displays, and LCD TVs, lots of Japanese leading manufacturing companies failed to generate a big return from the innovation they had initiated. Valuable researches about this problem have been accumulated. Solar energy cells industry is regarded, with strong suspicion, as one such example. Although most of the existing researches have concentrate on a particular product or technology area and analyzed it at great length, solar cells industry has so strong technological relevance with other products such as semiconductors; we need to take into account that different products can share the same technology or one product area uses the technology applied from the other. From a cross-cutting point of view, we conducted exploratory research about solar cells industry, and established a framework for analyzing innovation and competition among firms.