MANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS Customer Preference Discontinuities: A Trigger for Radical Technological Change

What factors cause a mature industry to re-enter a period of technological turbulence? This paper addresses this question by developing a model of technological evolution that incorporates both technological trajectories and a new concept: preference trajectories, which are cycles of incremental and discontinuous change in preferences. Preference discontinuities turn out to play an important role in triggering technological transitions in an industry. I illustrate the model with an historical study of the typesetter industry, which underwent three major technological transitions, each of which was driven by preference discontinuities

Surviving radical technological change : an empirical study of the typesetter industry

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-224).by Mary Tripsas.Ph.D

The accidental entrepreneur: The emergent and collective process of user entrepreneurship.

ABSTRACT We develop a process model of how users, an understudied source of entrepreneurship, create, evaluate, share, and commercialize their ideas. We compare and contrast our model to the classic model of the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the emergent and collective nature of the user's entrepreneurial process. Users are often "accidental" entrepreneurs who happen upon an idea through their own use and then share it with others; more specifically, the development of an idea and subsequent experimentation, adaptation, and preliminary adoption often occur before that idea is formally evaluated as the basis of a commercial venture. Users also tend to engage in collective creative activity prior to firm formation -often within the social context provided by user communities -that results in the improvement of ideas. Finally, we provide detailed data on the prevalence of user entrepreneurship in the juvenile products industry.

Thinking about technology: Applying a cognitive lens to technical change

We apply a cognitive lens to understanding technology trajectories across the life cycle by developing a co-evolutionary model of technological frames and technology. Applying that model to each stage of the technology life cycle, we identify conditions under which a cognitive lens might change the expected technological outcome predicted by purely economic or organizational models. We also show that interactions of producers, users and institutions shape the development of collective frames around the meaning of new technologies. We thus deepen our understanding of sources of variation in the era of ferment, conditions under which a dominant design may be achieved, the underlying architecture of the era of incremental change and the dynamics associated with discontinuities.

The accidental entrepreneur: The emergent and collective process of user entrepreneurship.

ABSTRACT We develop a process model of how users, an understudied source of entrepreneurship, create, evaluate, share, and commercialize their ideas. We compare and contrast our model to the classic model of the entrepreneurial process, highlighting the emergent and collective nature of the user's entrepreneurial process. Users are often "accidental" entrepreneurs who happen upon an idea through their own use and then share it with others; more specifically, the development of an idea and subsequent experimentation, adaptation, and preliminary adoption often occur before that idea is formally evaluated as the basis of a commercial venture. Users also tend to engage in collective creative activity prior to firm formation -often within the social context provided by user communities -that results in the improvement of ideas. Finally, we provide detailed data on the prevalence of user entrepreneurship in the juvenile products industry