Technological learning in large firms: mechanism and processes.

The prerequisite of developing countries' economic growth is to move along the technological development trajectory through technological learning, and large firms as hubs of technological knowledge, play an important role in this transition. In this paper, we tried to bridge two main taxonomies in the field of technological development, one of them referring to taxonomies of firms, and the other one referring to technological learning processes. We have identified technological learning processes in several post catch-up large firms through content analysis and then by employing a survey approach, we explore technological learning processes of Iranian large firms. The results indicate that as per scale-intensive firms in Iran, learning by doing, learning by using, learning by interacting and learning from spillovers are respectively the most important technological learning processes. Regarding large science-based firms, learning by searching, learning by interacting and learning from spillovers are the key learning processes. Finally, these results have been compared with those of post catch-up large firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]