The Co‐Diffusion of Complementary Innovations: Supermarket Scanners and UPC Symbols

Abstract

Co-diffusion is the positive interaction between the demands for complementary innovations that have separate adoption tracks. This interaction is of growing importance to business strategy because a firm can facilitate the diffusion of an innovation by supporting and participating in the development and commercialization of related complementary technologies. This phenomenon is of special importance where connectivity among products is central to end-user value. Louis P. Bucklin and Sanjit Sengupta report results of their empirical investigation of the co-diffusion of laser scanners in supermarkets and Universal Product Code (UPC) symbols printed on the packages of stocked items. Their results show asymmetric two-way co-diffusion effects between these innovations. Co-diffusion effects are found to be stronger than innovation effects. Finally, the analysis reveals differential co-diffusion effects across major market segments.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 74 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.