Technological pre-adaptation, speciation, and emergence of new technologies: how Corning invented and developed fiber optics

Gino Cattani

251 citations0/0 files storedIndustrial and Corporate Change

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Innovation and Knowledge Management Firm Innovation and Growth Innovation Diffusion and Forecasting

Abstract

This article investigates how established firms innovate and even initiate new technological trajectories. We build on and expand the notion of technological speciation to describe how a new technology emerges when a firm leverages its technological knowledge into a new application domain. Current research on technological speciation does not investigate how firms accumulate the technological knowledge which they eventually redeploy into different domains. Nor does it clarify the precise role of luck (historical accidents) and foresight (strategy) in shaping the overall process. This requires a finer grained investigation of the microprocesses and evolutionary forces underlying the dynamics of technological speciation. To this end, we use a longitudinal case study of Corning’s invention and development of fiber optics technology. We focus less on testing theory and more on describing a phenomenon to generate new theoretical insight. Models of technological evolution generally describe the technology life cycle as one of incremental innovation punctuated by periods of radical innovations that spur the emergence of new technologies (e.g., Abernathy and Utterback, 1978; Tushman and Romanelli, 1985; Tushman and Anderson, 1986; Anderson and Tushman, 1990; Mokyr, 1990). During rapid change, new entrants typically outperform incumbents. Established firms under-invest in radical innovation (Henderson, 1993), fall into competency traps (Levitt and March, 1988), are hampered by their core rigidities (Leonard-Barton, 1992) or remain committed only to their main customers (Christensen, 1997). As a result, they often do not survive the new cycle of creative destruction (Schumpeter, 1934).

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