Technology in Society 66 (2021) 101595 0160-791X/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Lessons learned from an unsuccessful “catching-up” in the automobile industry of Iran Mohammadreza Minaee a , Shaban Elahi a, * , Mehdi Majidpour b , Manoochehr Manteghi c a Department of Information Technology Management, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran b Department of Management, Science and Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran c Department of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Technological catch-up Regimes Policy Latecomer Automobile industry Iran ABSTRACT In contrast to existing studies mostly investigating successful cases of technological catching-up, this paper aims to analyse a limited catch-up by an Iranian automobile frm. Using thematic analysis, and based on the con- ceptual framework developed in the literature review, the empirical data were coded and categorised into the themes and dimensions. The resulting contextualized framework, as one of the main contributions of this study, suggests how the certain sectoral environment of the automobile industry contributes to the lackluster perfor- mance of catching-up by the domestic frm. The sectoral environment (i.e. technological regimes, market re- gimes, and government policies) of Iran’s automobile industry (IAI) is characterized by ineffective technology transfer, diverse technological areas, high tacit knowledge, the extensive backward linkages, high scale intensity, under-developed domestic supply chain, capital-goods attitude to the consumer goods, the oligopolistic struc- ture, and homogeneous market. This paper also identifes new catch-up’s infuencing factors (i.e. industrial strategy and structural issues) inductively emerged during the empirical data analysis. And fnally, comparison of the automobile industry in Iran and a few Asian countries shows that local content requirements (LCRs) will not bring about indigenous development unless it is complemented by the export market discipline and scale economy. 1. Introduction There exist a stream of literature that mainly draw upon the concepts of ‘sectoral systems of innovation’ (SSI) [1] and ‘leapfrogging’ [2] to analyse the micro-dynamics of catching-up by the latecomer frms. Ac- cording to this group of literature, which we call it ‘regime-based approach’, dimensions of SSI framework (i.e. technological regimes, market regimes, and government policies) largely determine the con- ditions for catching-up in a sector. [3–9]. As the process of learning and capability building varies remarkably across sectors, and even frms within the same sector [8,10,11], we believe that the regime-based approach can appropriately refect the particularities of the sector, particularly in terms of technological and market regimes. In fact, analysis of catching-up without considering idiosyncratic nature of the sector wherein latecomers operate would not yield a realistic repre- sentation of the phenomenon. The empirical study of six different in- dustries in developing countries by Malerba and Nelson [8] also supports the argument that catching-up as a process of learning and capability building vary signifcantly across sectors in terms of factors leading to their success or failure. In this light, a number of studies tried to examine the role of tech- nological and market regimes of automobile industry in East Asian economies, including Korea and China (see for example, [,3,4,8,12–16]. These studies largely note how the industry’s regimes affect the catch-up strategies. However, they have identifed almost identical elements to describe technological and market regimes of the industry. The elements include predictability of technological trajectory, accessibility of foreign technologies, properties of knowledge base, frequency of innovation, cumulativeness of technical advances, and segmented market. More- over, most of the literature has not yet empirically delved into the paths of capability accumulation inside an automobile frm (for exception see, [13]). At the same time, the extant literatures mostly try to analyse the successful cases, paying less attention to the cases of catching-up with limited success (for exception see, [17]). While analysing factors leading to a successful catch-up prove to be of high signifcance, exploring the factors restraining catch-up could also provide fruitful lessons for * Corresponding author. Nasr, Jalal AleAhmad, Tehran, P.O.Box: 14115-111, Iran. E-mail address: elahi@modares.ac.ir (S. Elahi). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technology in Society journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101595 Received 15 September 2020; Received in revised form 25 January 2021; Accepted 3 April 2021