This article aims to understand Cambodia's long-term trade specialization patterns at the country and industry levels. To achieve this, trade specialization indices are constructed for a sample of 253 industries. The findings show that Cambodia has an incipient national innovation system to support the organizational and technological capabilities of dometic firms. It has four growing high-tech, sixteen emerging high-tech, and eleven marginal high-tech industries. The country is also home to eleven growing low-tech, twelve emerging low-tech, and seventy-one marginal industries. Cambodian industries reveal stickiness and incremental change, which means that the initial trade specialization values move slowly towards the average within sectors. There was a decrease in the dispersion of trade specialization, which is indicative of slow mobility across sectors towards the broad pattern of specialization. This finding suggests that Cambodia lacks Schumpeterian entrepreneurs, who have the organizational and tecnological capabilities to learn and adapt new knowledge and technologies into the local context before diffusing them into the broader economy to build national competitiveness.