Catching up in a bidirectional way: evidence from chinese electric automotive industry leader BYD

To catch up with leaders, whether latecomers should follow an “imitation to innovation” path or an “innovating to leapfrog” path is still not quite clear. To shine some light on this issue, we focus on the case of BYD, a latecomer growing from nobody to the pioneer of Chinese electric automotive industry and the champion in world electric vehicle sales in a dozen years. We find that BYD catches up in a bidirectional way by which it has kept doing imitation and innovation from the start and made them well balanced to achieve the best of cost performance. This is different from the unidirectional view that a latecomers' catching-up either starts from a reverse innovation way like “from imitation to innovation”, or from a leapfrogging way that requires “science-technology-innovation” Evidence is also found that technology accumulation affects BYD's selection between imitation and innovation. This paper helps latecomers to make a better decision for their catching-up.