 Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex TechnologiesWilly C. Shih ()
Strategy Science, 2021, vol. 6, issue 1, 54-61 Abstract: Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with the expertise needed to make them work. In this paper, we propose increasing levels of abstraction as a strategy for speeding the adoption of new technologies. Higher-level abstractions package complexity in ways that makes them easier to understand and recombine, and they decrease the resources needed by firms to deploy sophisticated technical know-how. Increasing the level of abstraction is a way to push forward the innovative frontier by making such difficult-to-use technologies readily accessible to other innovators. Although this framing has been used in engineering and software development to describe modular encapsulation and cumulative innovation, we propose its use in the management literature to describe more broadly the uptake of new technologies and their facile recombination. This framing casts a different light on cumulative innovation and exposes new managerial questions to explore Keywords: diffusion of innovation; technological change; technology and innovation management; technology strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orstsc:v:6:y:2021:i:1:p:54-61 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Strategy Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC. |
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