Dear AOM Members,
We call your attention to our PDW session, "Technoentrepreneurship: the questions we should ask", on Sunday, 10th from 9 am to 12 pm in Room 212A of the Convention Center.
We invite conceptual and empirical papers that focus on the demand-side determinants of technoentrepreneurship. Please mail your papers to Prof. Francois Therin [
francois.therin@euromed-marseille.com]. Prof. Lalit Manral will lead the session with a presentation that will be followed by 5-10 minute presentations by the submitters. If you do not have a paper we encourage you to come with your research ideas on this topic and present them in our session! The idea of the session is to foster collaborative research in this area of scholarship. We hope to come out with a special issue of The International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship to publish the research that is motivated by this workshop.
The demand-side determinants of technoentrepreneurship
How does technology create its own demand and thereby establish the foundation of a new industry? Industries and/or markets are not created by 'technology push' alone or for that matter 'demand-pull' (Rosenberg, 1974; Scherer, 1982c). A new industry originates - inadvertently or intentionally - due to the new correspondence (or fit) between a technology and its co-evolving context (Clark, 1995). This correspondence or fit is brought about by the path dependent investment actions of firms (Nelson and Winter, 1982). The process of industry evolution is therefore explainable in terms of the co-evolution of technology and demand structure. Temporally heterogeneous firm investment strategies that underlie the co-evolution of technology and demand structure influence the evolution of the industrial market structure. The temporal heterogeneity of firm investment strategy, which corresponds to the variation in rules of selection even though the logic of economic selection remains constant, conforms to the adaptive logic under conditions of high uncertainty. However, there is a missing link in the literature that prevents us from understanding industry evolution in terms of co-evolution of technology and demand structure. Basically, not much is known about the endogenous relationship between the continuously evolving demand structure and firm investment strategy.
Managers often underestimate the dynamic nature of heterogeneous consumer preferences, which underlie the demand structure. Managing consumer preferences is specifically relevant for firms who invest considerable resources to develop new products that involve a long gestation period. The initial breakthrough of an entirely new set of applications and continued success through its life cycle requires considerable investment in not only informing and persuading consumers but also learning about their evolving preferences. These investments are complementary to the various technology specific investments involved in developing and later managing the set of applications throughout its life cycle. The gap between the managerial belief set at the onset of a development project and the actual state of consumer preferences along the evolutionary path of the underlying technology often explains the initial or subsequent failure of block buster products. For instance, Intel's superior performance is usually attributed to the effectiveness of its R&D investment to (say) increase microprocessor speeds. However, the same needs to be attributed as much to Intel's complementary investments in either creating applications that require increased processing speed, and/ or influencing consumer preferences to adopt such applications. Finally, who can forget Watson's famous prediction about the total demand for five computers?
LALIT MANRAL, PhD
Assistant Professor of Management
College of Management
Long Island University - CW Post Campus,
720 Northern Boulevard, Roth Hall # 206, Brookville, New York, 11548
Tel # 1-516-299-2360 (o) Fax # 1-516-299-3917
e-mail:
lalit.manral@liu.edu
web:
http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/lmanral/ <https://webmail.euromed-marseille.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/lmanral/>
Dr. Francois Therin
Associate Professor, Euromed Marseille Ecole de Management
Editor, International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship
Euromed Marseille Ecole de management (AMBA & EQUIS accredited)
Domaine de Luminy BP 921 - 13288 Marseille cedex 9 France
tel +33(0) 491 827 779 - fax +33(0) 491 827 983 - Mobile +33(0) 603 343 691
francois.therin@euromed-marseille.com
www.technoentrepreneurship.com <http://www.technoentrepreneurship.com/>
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