9. Conclusion

Drawing on historical evidence and recent empirical data on the Vietnamese motorcycle industry collected through repeated rounds of in-depth fieldwork, this book has shown that (1) suppliers learning trajectories in this industry evolved over time, resulting in a divergence in learning performance across suppliers in later stages of industrial development and (2) the diverging performance can be explained by the combination of roles played by lead firms in inducing and facilitating supplier learning and the roles of suppliers in mobilising their own sources of knowledge. These findings not only provide highly dynamic and insightful accounts of supplier learning in a developing country context but also make key theoretical and methodological contributions to the research on value chain participation and supplier learning.