Technology Legitimation: A Product-Level Examination Across the Technology Lifecycle – explores legitimacy of products across the lifecycle of a technology. The study distinguishes between the firms’ legitimation behavior and the customers’ legitimation emphasis. These were the stages explored (adding to Utterback and Abernathy’s famous model):
- fluid stage – characterized by radical innovation, where no standards are still present. Firms experiment around a new technology, focusing on improving performance
- Transition stage – dominant design emerges leading to the expected characteristics of the products to stabilize. Firms focus on sales
- Specific stage – technology matures leading firms to focus on cost reduction and improving productivity
- Reto stage – mature technologies maintaining their competitiveness as niche products
Inside the technology showroom: Sequence of technology demonstrations and willingness to collaborate – researchers explore what inspired people to collaborate with presenters in a technology showroom. First time I’ve heard of the theory on construal levels, which refer to whether people think abstractly or concreteley. The authors find that technical people tend to like projects with complementary resources, less-technical ones tend to prefer emerging technologies.
How fast is this novel technology going to be a hit? Antecedents predicting follow-on inventions – a patent study showing that “combining dissimilar technological components with strong science-based content are associated with trajectories showing a long take off time but with a high technological impact.“