Ethnocentrism & picoCHIP

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picoChip, a UK company, established an office in China during 2004. This is not an uncommon event in our global marketplace, except for the uniqueness of picoChip's business. The company serves wireless communications networks with processing equipment that translates information sent wirelessly into signals and then back into their original state at the receiving end. While wireless technologies are common, they are also subject to different standards across the world.

Several global organizations, along with governments and the private sector, are working to establish common international standards in wireless connectivity. This has proven most difficult in China and other parts of Asia. Of course, physics is universal. But the transmission standards, signal, spectrum, and packet design are not the same in all wireless technologies. China, in fact, has long promoted its own standards, and those are incompatible with the most commonly used 802.XX standards in the United States and other countries.

Why would the Chinese take the risk of establishing other standards? Wouldn't it be to their advantage to share the same wireless technologies as the rest of the world? After all, technology products can't be developed, manufactured, and refined without broadly accepted technical standards (Brown). Part of the reason is that they believe their own country will be the marketplace of choice in the future for wireless technologies. That is, they want to protect their "turf."

The discussion of technology transfer here, then, is not about the technology, but rather about government policy, trade provisions, and negotiations. Proprietary standards limit the potential interest by international companies to both buy from and sell to a country in the high-tech arena. With ...