Abstract: The manufacturing of complex construction machinery is a typical technology-intensive industry with a long industrial and technology chain, and involves many disciplines and technical fields. Since 2012, the sales volume and sales revenue of China’s construction machinery industry have ranked first in the world for many years. Some of its products have reached international leading standards in terms of technological level, and some brands have gained a certain reputation in the world. It is noteworthy that the innovation in construction machinery is still hard to catch up in China. Among the 2,000 construction machinery enterprises, only a few enterprises, such as Sany Heavy Industry Company and Zoomlion Company, have achieved steady catch-up, while most enterprises are still at the low of the industrial and technology chain. The above facts lead to the following question: Why are there obvious gaps in the process of innovation catch-up among latecomer enterprises? Judging from experience, the improvement of technical ability is the inevitable way for traditional manufacturing enterprises to get rid of the competitive predicament, establish new competitive advantages and realize the later developing enterprises to catch up with innovation.
From the perspective of technical capabilities, most of the existing researches have explored the gradual improvement of technological capabilities of late-stage enterprises in the process of innovation catch-up. It suggested that enterprise acquire relatively elementary technological capabilities at the beginning then develop to more advanced technological capabilities; and also highlight the evolution of technical capability from low to high level, and suggest low-level technology is the basis of higher-level technology and it promotes the development of higher-level technology. However, the research on the role of high level technology to low level technology and the relationship between various levels of technical capability still needs to be deepened. Also, the bulk of previous literature have focused their attention on the single factor mainly belonging to the two broad categories of organizational learning and resource governance influencing the improvement of technological capabilities. The paper highlight the role played by the combination of the organizational learning, resource management and technical capabilities to analyze the innovation catch-up process of the latecomer enterprises and reveal the objective laws and evolution laws.
The paper takes two listed companies which have successfully achieved innovation catch-up in the field of engineering production and manufacturing, as the case study objects and use the procedures and methods of grounded theory to summarizes the representative laws of the technological capability upgrading, organizational learning as well as resource governance activities in the process of innovation catching-up of the two enterprises.
〖JP2〗The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: (1) It is pointed out that the technological capabilities of complex equipment manufacturing enterprises generally include assembly and processing capabilities, manufacturing equipment and testing equipment capabilities, key components design and manufacturing capabilities to technical standards and new technological principles development capabilities, which form an interrelated system from low to high level. The existing theory of progressive capability development emphasizes the supporting role of low-level technological capabilities to high-level technological capabilities, but it does not reveal the promoting role of high-level technological capabilities to low-level technological capabilities. This paper further finds that high echelon technological capabilities also have pulling effects on low echelon technological capabilities. It reveals the “mutual promotion” law between high-level and low-level technological capability, and the law of “sequential” model has been raised. (2) The research found that with the improvement of technological capability, the organizational learning and resource governance activities of enterprises also show the characteristics of “sequential” evolution. Organizational learning has gradually evolved from exploitative learning, non-linear learning to global exploratory learning, and resource governance has gradually evolved from externalized and relational governance to global market and internalized governance. At the same time, it reveals the matching relationship among technological capability system, organizational learning and resource governance. (3) Mastering knowledge of technology and engineering science are the key factors to enhance the core technological capability of manufacturing enterprises of complex construction machinery, which should be paid close attention to in the whole process of innovation catch-up.
The above conclusions are helpful to guide the innovation catch-up practice of Chinese enterprises in the following three aspects: First, Sequential model is helpful for later-developing enterprises to identify the key development objects in the technological capability system according to their catching-up stage. It enlightens catch-up enterprises to cultivate high-level technological capabilities in advance, and then promote the overall technological capability system of enterprises. Second, it is also necessary to actively promote the sequential development of organizational learning and resource governance activities, so as to support the sequential upgrading of technological capabilities. Actively guiding and promoting organizational learning activities should evolve from exploitative and non-linear learning to global exploratory learning; resource governance activities should evolve from externalization and relationship governance to global local market and internalization governance. Third, it suggests that enterprises should attach importance to the mastery of technological and engineering scientific knowledge. In fact, insufficient attention to the importance of technology and engineering science knowledge and investment in resources have restricted the innovation catching-up process of China’s later complex construction machinery manufacturing enterprises to a certain extent.
It should be pointed out that it is necessary to simplify the actual evolution process and various characteristics of the object of study, so as to make the results easy to remember and disseminate. The applicability of the “sequential” model summarized in this paper also has some limitations. In addition, the conclusions drawn from the inductive analysis of limited cases also have some limitations. Therefore，it requires further revise the conceptual framework proposed in this study based on the typical cases in different countries and regions in the future．

Key words:  latecomer enterprises, engineering machinery manufacturing firm, innovation catch-up, technological capabilities, organizational learning