Incumbent firm invention in emerging fields: evidence from the semiconductor industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Incumbent firms are often thought to focus on incremental innovations and only respond to a major technological change once its impact on established markets and/or dominant designs becomes clear. We argue, however, that incumbent firms have many reasons to proactively invent early in cycles of technological change. Our interest is in the strategies that allow incumbents to be successful in this endeavor during the infancy of an emerging field—the period before it is clear how the field will affect dominant designs. Our evidence counters the stereotypical view that incumbent firms play a passive role in major technological changes by adhering to incremental inventions in the existing dominant designs. Rather, we find significant inventions by incumbents outside the existing dominant designs and relate their success to their willingness to search novel areas, explore scientific knowledge in the public domain, and form alliances with a balanced portfolio of partners. We find support for our hypotheses using data from the global semiconductor industry between 1989 and 2002. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".