Organisational Responses to Discontinuous Innovation: A Case Study Approach

Research that examines entrant-incumbent dynamics often points to the organisational limitations that constrain incumbents from successfully pursuing new technologies or fending off new entrants. Some incumbents are nevertheless able to successfully implement organisational structures and develop routines that overcome these institutional constraints. We provide a case-study analysis of how three firms - Motorola, IBM and Kodak - responded to discontinuous innovations and the associated structural and organisational limitations that are typical to incumbent organisations. Each firm was able to capture gains from new technologies and develop profitable products in emerging markets, although their abilities to sustain these gains varied due to subsequent organisational changes. Drawing from these case studies, we synthesise how firms can institute organisational strategies to continue to capture gains from disruptive innovations. A schema suggests that particular organisational strategies are comparatively optimal for corresponding points along an innovation lifecycle

The Illusive Slump of Disruptive Patents

Despite tremendous growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, the popular press has recently raised concerns that disruptive innovative activity is slowing. These dire prognoses were mainly driven by Park et al. (2023), a Nature publication that uses decades of data and millions of observations coupled with a novel quantitative metric (the CD index) that characterizes innovation in science and technology as either consolidating or disruptive. We challenge the Park et al. (2023) methodology and findings, principally around concerns of truncation bias and exclusion bias. We show that 88 percent of the decrease in disruptive patents over 1980-2010 reported by the authors can be explained by their truncation of all backward citations before 1976. We also show that this truncation bias varies by technology class. We update the analysis to 2016 and account for a change in U.S. patent law that allows for citations to patent applications in addition to patent grants, which is ignored by the authors in their analysis. We show that the number of highly disruptive patents has increased since 1980---particularly in IT technologies. Our results suggest caution in using the Park et al. (2023) methodology as a basis for research and decision making in public policy, industry restructuring or firm reorganization aimed at altering the current innovation landscape

Agricultural Biotechnology's Complementary Intellectual Assets

We formulate and test a hypothesis to explain the dramatic restructuring experienced recently by the plant breeding and seed industry. The reorganization can be explained in part by the desire to exploit complementarities between intellectual assets needed to create genetically modified organisms. This hypothesis is tested using data on agricultural biotechnology patents, notices for field tests of genetically modified organisms, and firm characteristics. The presence of complementarities is identified with a positive covariance in the unexplained variation of asset holdings. Results indicate that coordination of complementary assets have increased under the consolidation of the industry

From universal service to universal connectivity

Two features of the century-old policy goal of promoting universal telephone service in the United States have been enduring. Policymakers have focused on (1) wireline telephone (and more recently, fixed-line broadband) services and (2) households. The widespread adoption of mobile telephones compels a fresh examination of this focus. We construct a new measure of universal connectivity which accounts for consumers’ choices of communications technologies and for their geographic mobility over the course of the day. This measure, in turn, compels a conceptual and empirical investigation of the determinants of mobile telephone diffusion within families. Our estimations of intra-household demand for mobile service permit us to develop simulations that estimate the economic impact of modernizing a key element of existing universal service policy (viz., the Lifeline Program) to reflect the goal of improving individual connectivity. We find that a policy expansion from a single subsidy per household to multiple subsidies per eligible household members would increase mobile subscriptions by 2.25 million and Lifeline costs by $250 million

The Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) birth cohort study: Assessment of environmental exposures

The Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development birth cohort was designed to elucidate interactions between environment and genetics underlying development of asthma and allergy. Over 3600 pregnant mothers were recruited from the general population in four provinces with diverse environments. The child is followed to age 5 years, with prospective characterization of diverse exposures during this critical period. Key exposure domains include indoor and outdoor air pollutants, inhalation, ingestion and dermal uptake of chemicals, mold, dampness, biological allergens, pets and pests, housing structure, and living behavior, together with infections, nutrition, psychosocial environment, and medications. Assessments of early life exposures are focused on those linked to inflammatory responses driven by the acquired and innate immune systems. Mothers complete extensive environmental questionnaires including time-activity behavior at recruitment and when the child is 3, 6, 12, 24, 30, 36, 48, and 60 months old. House dust collected during a thorough home assessment at 3–4 months, and biological specimens obtained for multiple exposure-related measurements, are archived for analyses. Geo-locations of homes and daycares and land-use regression for estimating traffic-related air pollution complement time-activity-behavior data to provide comprehensive individual exposure profiles. Several analytical frameworks are proposed to address the many interacting exposure variables and potential issues of co-linearity in this complex data set