关键词: 信息通用目的技术, 结构性互构, 创新互补性, 技术体系演进

Abstract:    As the advanced General-Purpose Technologies(GPTs) in the age of intelligence, the innovation of GPTs facilitates the development of the society and economy crucially. However, as Chinese information companies are repeatedly subject to "battle neck" technologies of the ones outside the country, especially the decisive and basic kernel techniques, corporate innovation and national economic development are severely constrained. 
    The existing researches of GPTs summaries that the dynamic mechanism of the GPTs′ innovation is the complementarities, which is without the analysis on the micro-level mechanism. The existing papers in the field of the innovations of GPTs in the classical economic perspective always consider the GPTs or the innovation of them as a scalar for the economic development. In contrast, the ones in the field of the innovations of GPTs in the classical technology management perspective always consider the GPTs or the innovation of them as one kind of tools or input factors. Which the above two fields ignored are the reverse promotion from the promotion process during which the innovation and evolution of information technology and its systems have promoted the innovations of the other technologies. 
    The only exception is the field of evolutionary economics. By distinguishing characteristics of GPTs, Bekar et al.(2017) consider multipurpose and single-purpose technologies according to their micro-technological characteristics. In addition, as the paper has stated, one technology, which could be as GPTs, requires recognizing their evolutionary nature, and accepting possible uncertainties concerning marginal cases. It is obvious that the dynamics of the innovations of the information general-purpose technologies have the evolutionary nature. What they have ignored is the procedure of the reverse parts of the microcosmic dynamic mechanism and the technological architecture of the GPTs. 
    In order to reveal the microcosmic dynamics mechanism, in especial the reverse parts of it, this paper conducts a longitudinal cases study about the long-term evolutionary period. During the three technological evolution period, this paper takes the investigation on the use of a series of the information technologies by Wal-Mart on the perspectives of GPTs theory and the technological architecture evolution theory. The technological evolution period includes the computer phase, the internet phase and the data science phase.
    By paying attention to the co-constructional processes between the implementation structure of the technological architecture from technological providers′ side and the functional structure of the technological demands of the technological users′ side, this paper purposes that the microcosmic dynamic mechanism of information technologies′ innovations includes two kinds of complementarities: the Exo-complementarity and the Endo-complementarity. 
    The Exo-complementarity forms the atomistic or holistic reverse promotion mechanism of the information technologies′ innovations, which base on the co-construction processes of the two structures of the technical providers and the technical users. 
     The atomistic reverse promotion mechanism has four forms, including module innovation, module refactoring, structure optimization and system reconfiguration. First, the module innovational mechanism discoveries the reverse promotion procedure in which the process of the technology user′s demand function structure extended from the technical import of GPTs. In addition, one or some of the GPTs must add to their technology module to achieve the effective module creation and technology expansion for the extension of the former. The second reverse promotion mechanism form is the module refactoring mechanism. During which process, under the premise of ensuring that the properties of the required functional structure module are unchanged, the internal structure of the module of one or some of the GPTs are reversely promoted to redesign and improve the operating efficiency of the implementation module. The structure optimization mechanism reveals the reverse promotion from the addition and deletion of the required functional structures. During the procedure, the addition and deletion of non-architectural technical components in the technological system of the GPTs caused by the addition and deletion of the required functional structure increases the overall efficiency of the technological system. The last mechanism is the system reconfiguration, which has the most innovative for the GPTs. In the procedure of mechanism, under the premise of ensuring the functional structure of the technical requirements, the technological subsystems in the implementation structure of the GPTs system are reversely promoted to carry out the innovation of the overall architecture redesign, thereby improving the efficiency of the technological system. 
    In contrast to the atomistic mechanisms, the holistic reverse promotion mechanism of the information technologies′ innovations fails to consider the reverse promotion mechanism in some one technological evolution phase, but the transitional phase between some two technological evolution phases. In the transitional phase, the technical users need to balance the requirements for the functional structural integrity and the minimization of enterprise costs, which two processes should adopt the middleware technology of the non-homologous technologies of the different implementation structures of the GPTs system. Therefore, it is necessary for technology users to maintain a moderate search behavior for potential homogenous backward technologies of the forward-looking general-purpose technologies adopted by the technology users. In addition, the co-construction process of the two parties of the GPTs system transforms the external innovation drivers into the intrinsic micro-dynamics of the innovation of the GPTs, and finally forms a holistic mechanism for reverse promoting the innovation of the GPTs system. 
   The endo-complementarity forms the heuristic reverse promotion mechanism of the innovations of the forward technologies and the backtracked reverse promotion mechanism of the innovations of the backward technologies, which base on the co-construction processes of the subsystem of the implementation structures of the technical providers of the same technological architecture. 
    The heuristic reverse promotion mechanism of the innovations of the forward GPTs defines the procedure in which the processes of the forward GPTs promoting the innovations of the backward ones reversely promote the innovations of the forward ones. The backward GPTs make a certain degree of structural decomposition for the forward technology, and based on its own architectural model innovative design idea(relative to the forward technology), re-discover the emerging technology functions of the forward technology, and thus derive new technological field of the forward GPTs. 
     The backtracked reverse promotion mechanism of the innovations of the backward technologies reveals the procedure in which the forward the processes of the backward GPTs promoting the innovations of the forward ones reversely promote the innovations of the backward ones. The innovation of the implementation structure of the forward GPTs will be directly transmitted to the backward ones, thereby reconstructing or optimizing the implementation structure of the backward technologies or sub-technologies; immediately following the original technical structure logic is associated, so that the backward technology must take the innovations. Which constructs the iterative improvement response of technological implementation, or targeted adjustment, thus it achieves the technological innovation of backward technologies themselves.
    The study will offer some implications for the R&D strategy of industrial organizations and the industrial policies making. 

Key words: general purpose information technology, co-constructional process, innovation complementarity, technological architecture evolution