Introduction

Abstract

In secluded seminar rooms with dim lights and curtained windows at both NTT Docomo in Tokyo and the LG Research and Development (R&D) Institute in Seoul, we met with chief technology officers from each company to learn about how the large Korean and Japanese corporations were coping with globalization and changes in the national innovation system (NIS) after the rise of what we have termed “mad” technology. Our meetings took place in late fall 1999, when “dot.com” companies dominated the headlines in most economic newspapers and magazines. As we will show in Chapter 2, when we discuss what mad technology is and what is “mad” about mad technology, recent changes in the NIS and the global technology markets have been so revolutionary and alarming to us at the time that we felt it was imperative to meet and talk with these people in their corporate headquarters.

The most urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of primary needs, but the reparation of the damages wrought by the technology of yesterday. (Dennis Gabor (1900–1979), the 1971 Nobel physics prize winner)