Excerpt from Management of National Technology Programs in a Newly Industrializing Country Taiwan: Jong-Tsong Chiang, March 1990

As a result, the study of Taiwan's national technology programs from a managerial point of view has to be rather self-dependent.

In this research, three sources of information are heavily relied upon. The first is a large scale empirical study mainly done by the author under the auspices of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (itri, Taiwan's largest industrial r&d complex) in 1979 and 1980 about industrial r&d and technology transfer. This study includes 14 in-depth case studies and quite detailed questionnaire survey (with overall respondent rate to 73 university engineering departments, 49 engineering and technical consulting organizations, 12 industrial associations, 131 industrial product importers, 170 companies with foreign investment, 180 companies with foreign technical cooperation, and 689 manufacturers covering 19 sub-industries in chemical, mechanical engineering and electronic industries. The main findings of this study were crystalized into a report titled Industrial Technology Developmentand Transfer in Taiwan (in Chinese) published by itri at the end of 1980. This study is unique in Taiwan in that it investigated concrete industrial technological issues without much abstraction. It also represents a historical record until the new era beginning around 1980 when the national technology programs and the first grand national s&t plan, the two unprecedented national thrusts, were initiated.

The second major source of information is the results of a seminar series the Formation of Big Science and Technology Programs designed and organized by the author and formally sponsored by the Science and Technology Advisory Group for Premier (stag, the actual initiation center of Taiwan's national programs) during March through June in 1985, about 5 years after the launching of first 4 national programs and 3 years after the other 4 programs.2 The task force for this seminar series was made up of about ten groups of experts invited from a variety of institutes. They all had strong technical background (many with doctoral degrees) and at least some managerial experience department or project leaders), but did not have personal stake in the programs they studied. They reviewed the formation and management of Taiwan's large scale programs and presented the results in the conference room of stag with participation of stag core staff and a limited number of concerned people from relevant organizations.3 The whole series consisted of 31 presentations, of which about half were given by program or department leaders up to deputy minister level about their own experience and viewpoints.4 Although many findings and judgments were disputable given the complexity of the programs and the rough research methods then, this series provided the first systematic information about the management of large scale programs, which could support further analysis from a cross technology perspective.

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