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As a major innovation of the 21st century, digital convergence prevails within informatized societies and has been instrumental in ushering the digital era. Digital convergence has reshaped various aspects of human life such as employment, education, entertainment, healthcare, and communication, as well as the structure and development of wider society. Economic powers including the United States, European nations, United Kingdom, China, and Japan have promoted digital convergence as a national development policy because its development is associated with quality of life in these countries. Therefore, a well-established environment for digital convergence comprising relevant development policies, infrastructures, and laws and regulations must be developed by the government. Moreover, although the socialization of an innovation represents improved quality of life, it also poses a threat to the stakeholders of the original target market, causing intergroup conflict. Such conflict normally engenders barriers to the enhancement of quality of life, wider gaps from the quality of life of other countries, and substantial economic losses. Taiwan is yet to experience a major breakthrough in digital convergence.
Policies and programs concerning the development of digital convergence are enormous enterprises. It is crucial for the government to manage such enterprises effectively and strengthen the information and telecommunications industry chain, thereby furthering digital convergence on a national scale. Such a national initiative is typically formulated by a decision-making team composed of experts from business, governmental, and educational organizations; however, the opinions of these decision-makers tend to diverge because of differences in professional backgrounds. Therefore, this study aims to explicate the dilemmas concerning the development of digital convergence and issues associated with the underlying value chain, and synergize the views of specialists from different professions. A literature review is conducted on the socialization of innovations, discontinuous innovation, and dilemmas between value networks and innovation to propose a socio-institutional theory of discontinuous innovation.
Semistructured interviews are administered to experts from business, governmental, and educational organizations to explore and compile their opinions on policies for the development of digital convergence in Taiwan. The rationale behind each opinion is elucidated and analyzed from various perspectives to clarify similarities and dissimilarities among the opinions. The findings of this study are expected to further decision-makers’ understanding of diverging views on digital convergence development in Taiwan and of what causes such disagreement. Following the interview analysis, the influence of social identity and differences among social institutions are investigated. Empirical data analysis shows that for the policy on “promoting the convergence of televisions and communications”, low cohesion exists between experts from industry and government regarding launching mobile value-added services and facilitating the investment and development of digital convergence industries). Furthermore, low cohesion existed between experts from industry and academia regarding expediting the digitization of cable and terrestrial televisions and facilitating the investment and development of digital convergence industries. For the policy on “harmonizing laws and environments for digital convergence”), considerable differences in opinions were found between experts from industry and government and between those from industry and academia regarding altering regulations on telecommunications, radio, and television and completing the legal framework of digital convergence and passing laws on digital convergence. These findings are highly consistent with the socio-institutional theory of discontinuous innovation proposed in this study and actual related circumstances.
Finally, based on the aforementioned theory comprising institutional entrepreneurship, common standards, embedded institutional contradictions, potential specifications, potential technical competition, collaborative competition, and exogenous bumps, this study argues that new societies form as a result of interactions between ecological processes. Innovations and new societies cannot exist without relevant theories, and evolving new societies by introducing innovation is not feasible because the private sector remains ahead of the public sector in terms of innovation. Moreover, because disagreements over the socialization of innovations originate from a variety of domains, policymakers tend to combine conflicting views. However, to achieve success, policies on innovation socialization should be implemented in order of priority and in a progressive manner. | en_US |