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Technological Trajectories: Role in Consumer Adoption of Innovations and Vendor Adoption of Complementary Technologies
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Sahay, Arvind Robertson, Thomas S. |
| Copyright Year | 1997 |
| Abstract | Innovations in the domain of high technology are generally comprised of multiple discrete technologies that interact with one another to deliver consumer benefits. As the number of technologies in products and services increases, firms face an increasing need to understand and track the evolution of technologies used in innovations in order to increase the probability of adoption. Technological trajectories capture the notion of technological evolution. The intent is to build a conceptualization of technological trajectories and to examine their effect on vendor adoption of complementary technologies and consumer adoption of the innovation that results. Introduction A manager at Sun Microsystems recently said “We are constantly working with Netscape on how their technology road map fits into ours” (Gage 1996). This statement reflects a conscious strategy on the part of Sun to track the “emerging paths” that technologies are taking, inside and outside the firm, in developing successful innovations. Succeeding with innovations in high technology markets is considerably complicated by the evolving nature of technology and the concurrent change in the benefit set offered to consumers. This benefit set depends not only on the attributes of the technology offered by a firm but also on the complementary technologies, from other firms, that enhance or complete the product offering for the individual user (Sengupta and Bucklin 1994). By identifying and anticipating changes in technology, marketers can influence the adoption of (1) complementary technologies by other vendors and (2) consumer acceptance of innovation based on these technologies. Anticipating changes in technology requires knowledge of technology road maps and knowledge of the relationships with intervening variables that may affect the influence of technological change on adoption. Research suggests that the number of technologies used in products and services is increasing (Granstrand et.al.1992) and that the level of technology involved in most industries has been rising (Gatignon and Xuereb 1997). Since successful innovations in high technology markets involve very uncertain paths through “foggy and shifting markets and technologies” (Eisenhardt and Tabrizi 1995), alignment of the interests of complementary technology producers becomes important for the success of innovations (Sengupta and Bucklin 1994). Marketing scholars have called for an explicit consideration of the effects of technological change on the operational decisions of the firm (Capon and Glazer 1987). This paper is a response to this challenge. We attempt to link technology change variables to vendor adoption behavior for c mplementary technologies and to consumer adoption behavior for innovations. The paper considers upply and demand side technological change simultaneously to study adoption by consumers and vendors. We identify variables that managers influence in product development and that mediate effects of technological change on adoption behavior. Finally, we suggest that study of the influence of technological change on adoption in high technology markets requires consideration of feedback effects . Background and Scope Technological change and technology road maps underpin the concept of technology trajectories (Dosi 1982). The trajectory of a technology in a product is defined as the set of possible paths that a technology can take as it evolves over time. These paths are defined in terms of (1) the developmental paths and uncertainties of the present and potential functionalities provided to consumers and (2) the relationship of these paths with those of other technologies that they interact with in providing benefits to the consumer. For instance, changes in Internet browser software on computers suggest possible future inclusion of electronic shopping functionality and interaction with retail firms’ computer systems. Historical data show that technological paths follow patterns on various attributes (Twiss 1996). The RB-211 and Trent engines from Rolls Royce, for example, have followed a trajectory in terms of thrust and range in powering the Boeing 777 and 747 respectively. As high-tech innovations have tended to rely on an increasing number of technologies over the years (Granstrand et. al. 1992), we assume that the products and services that we are considering have multiple technologies. We will think of technological products as composed of a combination of technologies within a product architecture (Morris and Ferguson 1993). Architecture defines how technologies combine, physically and functionally, to constitute a product. The technologies combine to deliver benefits to the customer through interaction among the underlying technologies. Since no one firm possesses all the required technologies, as GM did in the 1950s, independent vendors w ill offer various technologies that complement each other in the product. We define complementary technologies as the technologies needed to complete, or add to, the product offering for the individual user. The evolution of technologies is accompanied by increasing interdependence among producers of different technologies (Henderson and Clark 1990) and therefore, an increasing interaction among technologies. Interaction among technologies is important because combinations of technologies can lead to further innovations (Wind and Mahajan 1988). While each advancement in a technology can perform enhanced functions on its own; together a group of interacting technologies can do things that none alone can do, thereby increasing the benefits offered by the interacting technologies. The Wright brothers used the interaction of two emerging technologies when they invented the airplane. The first was the gasoline engine designed in the 1880s and the second was the advancement in aerodynamics developed from experiments on gliders (McGrath 1995). We discuss trajectories in more detail later. Thus, we emphasize the concept of technological trajectories for the marketing literature. We discuss both supply and demand side dimensions of trajectories that marketers need to consider and how trajectories affect adoption of complementary technology by other vendors. We also examine the effect of technological trajectories on consumer adoption of innovations. Finally, in a feedback effect, we suggest that in innovations composed of complementary technologies, both vendor adoption of complementary technologies, and consumer adoption of innovations based on the technologies, influence the trajectory of those technologies. The paper is organized as follows. A literature review relates theory and research on innovation diffusion and technology adoption in the marketing literature to our interests. The next section elaborates on technological trajectories and identifies dimensions used to study trajectories. Thereafter, we develop propositions describing the effect of technological trajectories on consumer adoption of innovation and on the probability of adoption of complementary technologies by vendors. We conclude by suggesting implications and directions for future research. Figure 1 provides a picture of the firms, technologies and consumers in our conceptualization. The reader will note that we distinguish between adoption of complementary technologies by vendors and the adoption of an innovation based these complementary technologies. Our exposition is from Firm A’s perspective. Firm A possesses one or more (but not all) of the technologies in a product. [ Figure 1 about here ] Literature Review Technological evolution is a powerful force in explaining the competitive dynamics of high technology markets (Lawless and Anderson 1996). A firm must understand not only the evolution paths of its own technologies but also those of complementary technologies from other firms. Understanding the evolution of and the matching of technologies is important because few high technology products function in isolation; they depend on their interaction with other technologies/products to deliver benefits to consumers (Bucklin and Sengupta 1993). To achieve competitive superiority through innovation, firms require a strong technological orientation in addition to a customer orientation (Gatignon and Xuereb 1997). It hardly needs emphasizing that the marketing literature has paid inadequate attention to technology. The literature remains biased toward consumer packaged goods. Between January 1986 and July 1997, in five leading marketing journals , under 2 percent of the published articles have addressed the marketing of technology, the use of technology in marketing or the impact of technology in marketing. Capon and Glazer (1987) argued for an explicit consideration of the effects of technological change on the strategic and operational decisions of the firm and the evaluation of options for developing technology. Research focusing on technology evolution as an influence on adoption behavior is, however, sparse (e.g., Cripps and Meyer 1994). Recent research relating to technological innovation examines relevant issues but does not address technological evolution. For instance, Weiss and Heide (1993) examine the effects of perceptions of technological heterogeneity, rate of technological change , buyers’ vendor related switching costs and search efforts on one another in the context of computer workstation purchases by organizations. Ramaswamy, Venkatraman and Reibstein (1994) discuss the nature of competitive behavior in industrial markets in terms of the effects of the structural characteristics of the served market. Using pen based computers as the context, Robertson, Eliashberg and Rymon (1995) empirically examine whether a firm should launch new products or change their marketing mix in reaction to a competitive new product announcement or ignore such an announcement. None of these studies, however, examines technology evolution or its effect on consumer adopti |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://facultyresearch.london.edu/docs/97-403.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
