How Industrial Supportive Policies Drive the Corporation Attention Shifting: A Case Study of BYD from New Energy Vehicles Industry

Policies in emerging economies, as environmental factors, have played an important role in promoting the disruptive technology industry development such as new energy vehicle. From Attention-based view, this paper explores how industrial supportive policies drive corporation attention from policy orientation to market orientation by strategy response in a case study of BYD. This paper establishes a three-dimensional framework of “motivate-regulate-shift” and identifies the two phases of China’s NEV industrial supportive policy. Based on these, we open the black box of corporate attention shifting: Driven by the changing of policies, firms’ regulation in every aspect from strategic direction and organizational restructuring to personnel allocation, resource acquisition and allocation promotes their attention focus to market orientation, which is an inside-out and gradually permeable shifting process. Further, all these strategic responses motivated by policies promote companies’ ability to improve their innovation R&D and output results. The finding provides lessons for NEV corporations to become more policy sensitive and more innovative R&D emphasized in disruptive technologies industry.