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Customer preference discontinuities: a trigger for radical technological change

✍ Scribed by Mary Tripsas


Publisher
John Wiley and Sons
Year
2008
Tongue
English
Weight
199 KB
Volume
29
Category
Article
ISSN
0143-6570

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✦ Synopsis


Abstract

What factors cause a mature industry to re‐enter a period of technological turbulence? This paper addresses this question by developing a model of technological evolution that incorporates both technological trajectories and a new concept: preference trajectories, which are cycles of incremental and discontinuous change in preferences. Preference discontinuities turn out to play an important role in triggering technological transitions in an industry. I illustrate the model with an historical study of the typesetter industry, which underwent three major technological transitions, each of which was driven by preference discontinuities. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.