Morris Chang

Morris Chang is the central figure of Chip War and the founder of TSMC. In the book’s telling he is the canonical Innovator’s Dilemma departure: after years at Texas Instruments — where he and Andy Grove fixated on the manufacturing reliability problem that let American chipmakers out-scale their Soviet rivals in the 1960s — Chang left after being passed over for CEO and founded TSMC. Kyle flags this as a textbook case study of org-structure preventing innovation that then walks away to find a better home, and raises the counterfactual: could TI have become TSMC if Chang had stayed?

Chang’s insight, drawn decades earlier, was that each generation of technology made fabs more expensive, so a pure-play foundry that fabricated chips for many designers could wring out efficiencies from massive production volumes that integrated firms couldn’t replicate — the “world-beating technology” vision behind TSMC’s model. The book credits that ambition with his willingness to spend enormous sums, expanding TSMC’s R&D team from 120 people in 1997 to 7,000 in 2013. Chip War also notes that, having studied at Stanford, returning to Communist China would have meant “certain poverty and possible imprisonment or death,” so like many of his cohort he built the electronics capabilities of the PRC’s rivals instead.

Context: Morris Chang (born 1931) is the Taiwanese-American businessman who founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in 1987, pioneering the dedicated semiconductor-foundry business model that now anchors the global chip supply chain.

Where this appears

• Chip War — central figure; founds TSMC after being passed over for CEO at Texas Instruments, the canonical Innovator’s Dilemma departure, and pioneers the pure-play foundry model.