Abstract:Although the research on the role of institutional, demand, and technological opportunities of latecomers in the semiconductor industry in catching up with initial innovation has received widespread attention, few studies have intensively showed how to build an innovation chain for successfully catching up and sustain development in the process of opportunity realization.The building of innovation chain is studied,in this paper, based on the process of opportunities realization when the Latecomer firm is catching up and beyond in semiconductor industry by taking Samsung in South Korea and ASML in the Netherlands as examples. The research results show that: 1)internal complementary and external focus innovation chains are two types mechanisms with the development of the semiconductor industry the process of achieving institutional, demand, and technological catch-up opportunities;2)the internal complementary innovation chain takes the local superposition process of institutions and demand opportunities as the main thread, achieving a parallel arrangement of elements such as talent return, product innovation, and inward open R&D; the external focused innovation chain is rooted in the systematic aggregation process of institutions, needs, and technological opportunities, achieving a selective arrangement of elements such as talent diversion, technological innovation, and outward oriented open research and development;3)overlapping local opportunities by transforming internal innovation can improve the innovation chain structure; system opportunity aggregation promotes the evolution of innovation chain structure through technological reduction; parallel and selective resource allocation jointly promote the transition of resources to value.The framework of the innovation chain is expanded,in this paper, by incorporating the opportunity window as the driving link base, which enhances the explanatory power of the innovation chain on the catching up and surpassing behavior of latecomer enterprises in the semiconductor industry. The result provides a new attempts and inspiration for enriching the deployment of differentiated innovation chains in the upstream and downstream of the industry chain.