Chinese vs. European views regarding technology assessment: Convergent or divergent?

This paper tries to identify whether Chinese and European assessments of their respective technology portfolios differ. A first question relates to the perceived levels of competitiveness and attractiveness of each technology portfolio. A second question relates to the underlying rationales to technology audit practices: does each of these practices tend to a unique and general model or do they exhibit some idiosyncratic features? Technology audits conducted in 10 Chinese and 40 European companies produced 454 self-assessments: 82 Chinese and 372 European. There are two conclusions: (a) comparisons of means show that attractiveness of technologies does not differ in the Chinese and the European samples; it can be inferred that Chinese and European are targeting technologies with similar value. However, Chinese technological competitiveness was clearly perceived as much lower. This shows that a competitive gap is still clearly perceived between China and Europe. (b) Factorial analyses show that rationales for assessment of technology attractiveness tend to diverge but that rationales for assessment of technological competitiveness tend to follow similar lines in both sub-samples; this is possibly because attractiveness is a culture-based concept while competitiveness is more and more global.