Industrial Leadership Changes without Technological Discontinuity: Modularization, Institution-Led Market Discontinuity, and Market Development Strategy

•We examine changes in industrial leadership without technological discontinuity.•We argue modularization can act as a technology ladder for latecomers’ catch-up.•Institution-led market discontinuity can create an opportunity for latecomers.•Latecomers’ market strategies are required to forge ahead in mature sectors. Previous studies on changes in industrial leadership, called “catch-up cycles,” focused on the critical role of technological disruption in the efforts by latecomers to forge ahead. However, we have recently witnessed leadership changes even in technologically mature sectors, such as industrial equipment, without technological discontinuity. To investigate changes in industrial leadership in these sectors, we propose a conceptual framework that emphasizes the role of modularization as a technology ladder for latecomers to narrow the technological gap with the frontier, institution-led market discontinuity by governments, and latecomers’ market development strategies. With this framework, we analyzed successive leadership changes in the Chinese excavator market, from Japan to Korea in the early and mid-2000s and from Korea to China after 2010. We advance our understanding of the catch-up phenomenon in business and society by describing the implications involved in latecomers’ leadership in mature sectors from a “non-Schumpeterian” perspective.