To see the geography of the technology industry, crack open an Apple iPhone. Although the firm that sells it is American, it provides none of the physical innards. The components are almost entirely Asian: the screen is mostly from Japan, the flash memory from South Korea, and it was assembled in China. Apple’s contribution is the design and software — and, importantly, integrating the innovations of others.

As goes the iPhone, so goes the broader technology industry. The biggest and most technically clever firms are American and European, but their predominance in research, innovation and production is being challenged by Asian companies. A new report by the OECD puts hard figures on the extent of this steady shift.

Every year around $1 trillion is spent on research and development (R&D) in computing, telecoms and electronics; America accounts for over one-third. But while corporate R&D in America and Europe grew by 1-2% between 2001 and 2006, in China it soared 23%. China is now close to surpassing Japan in total research spending, from almost nothing a decade ago. And as a percentage of GDP, China’s corporate R&D spending is almost on a par with the European Union’s (around 1%).

The OECD’s numbers show that Taiwan now has more high-tech researchers than Britain. And a list of the world’s 250 biggest technology firms shows that Taiwanese companies spend more on R&D than British and Canadian ones. That said, the types of job are different: the Taiwanese generally do lower-end work like making semiconductors. More sophisticated tasks, such as designing the chips’ circuitry, are still mostly done in the West.

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