Customer preference discontinuities: a trigger for radical technological change

Mary Tripsas
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Mary Tripsas: Harvard Business School, MA, USA, Postal: Harvard Business School, MA, USA

Managerial and Decision Economics, 2008, vol. 29, issue 2-3, pages 79-97

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.

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