Purpose:

Contribute to the study of the middle-income trap (MIT) by implementing the concept of institutional complementarity. That is, the principle that the operation of an institution affects the performance of other institutions, while degrees of complementarity affect competitiveness.

Methodological design:

This work is a study of a strategic high-tech industry such as the automotive industry in Mexico. A qualitative methodology was used including semi-structured interviews, participative observation, and documentary and discourse analysis using NVivo software.

Results:

Five limitations of institutional complementarity were identified that contribute to extending the MIT: silos and short-term work, lack of links to bring technology from academia to industry, limited multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary promotion and development, limits in national science coordination and technology and an industrial structure lacking a culture of R&D.

Research limitations:

The empirical exploration was limited to one industry. It is necessary to extend the exploration to cover other strategic export sectors such as electrical-electronic, aerospace, or pharmaceutical industries, to test the generalization and replication capabilities of the model and proposition presented.

Findings:

The precarious institutional complementarity between government, private and academic innovation agendas, as well as within them, limits the results achieved in terms of innovation and escalations in the automotive industry in Mexico and its role as a locomotive for other industries, despite being one of the productive platforms with the greatest capacity and with a range of initiatives to innovate and learn from, therefore extending the prevalence of the middle-income trap in Mexico. Institutional complementarity is a useful alternative concept to unravel the middle-income trap.

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