How to Succeed in the Presence of Financial 
and Technological Gaps: 
From the Perspective of Governance Innovation

Hannah Jun · Wonseok Woo and Hyoung-Goo Kang

Conventional wisdom would predict firms with little fi-nancial and technological capabilities to fail. This is es-pecially true for such firms in the high-tech sector dur-ing periods of industry downturn. In this paper, we ask how firms experiencing financial and technological gaps can succeed by transforming current challenges into op-portunities via governance innovation. We select Hynix and the semiconductor industry for the investigation. Hynix emerged from near bankruptcy become the number two player in the global semiconductor memory market. We find that Hynix’s case requires extending prevailing theory to focus on governance and control. We pinpoint speci-fic factors that contributed to Hynix’s success from the perspective of governance innovation for the theoretical extension and suggest practical implications.