TECHNOLOGICAL CAPABILITY AS AN INDICATIVE TOOL FOR STRENGTHENING THAILAND’S S-CURVE INDUSTRY: A CASE OF BROILER MEAT INDUSTRY

Food industry is significant to economic growth in Thailand because the country is one of the largest food exporters in the World. In particular, the broiler meat industry has been an integral part of Thailand’s economy for the past years. Its production cycle is much shorter in comparison to other source of meat-based protein while related technologies are intensively utilised along its supply chain. With a highly competitive nature of the broiler meat market, Thai government/policymakers seek to find appropriate measure to support the industry, requiring a set of comprehensive information on industry landscape. However, a lack of information on how well Thai private companies perform, in terms of technology utilization/ technological capability, poses problem among policymakers. This paper aims to propose a framework to evaluate technological capability of private firms by focusing on upstream section/ farms in the broiler meat industry as a case study. The theoretical framework by Bell and Pavitt, covering machinery and technology acquisition, tacit knowledge in production process and organization, was applied in this research. The capability level consists of 4 levels in ascending order; routine, basic (or adoptive), intermediate (or adaptive) and advanced (or innovative). Nine different aspects of farm’s activities, ranging from planning broiler house design to sourcing of feed and medication, were analysed. Finally, the proposed framework was tested by in-depth interviews at three ‘conventional-breed’ broiler farms and one additional ‘native-breed’ broiler farm. The result showed that the proposed framework was able to distinguish different levels of technological capability, regarding Primary activities and Supporting activities of the assessed farms. The analytical results of technology capability can be used to stipulate new supportive measures, especially budget allocation from the government, which leads to competitiveness enhancement for entrepreneurs in S-curve industries. Further works on larger number of samples coupled with international benchmarking are recommended to fine-tune the proposed framework.