IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/indcch/v27y2018i3p595-618..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Overcoming the inertia of organizational competence: Olivetti’s transition from mechanical to electronic technology

Author

Listed:
  • Erwin Danneels
  • Gianmario Verona
  • Bernardino Provera

Abstract

This historical case study of Olivetti, the Italian office products firm, argues that technological competence becomes socially embedded in a firm over time as it is legitimized, backed by powerful agents, and supported by resource allocation. Paradoxically, these three building blocks of a competence—legitimacy, power, and resources—both promote inertia and enable change. Inertia can be overcome when firms employ three levers of transition: organizationally separating an emerging technology to protect it, co-opting legitimacy by using the new technology to serve the incumbent technology, and diverting resources for the emerging technology’s development. Over time, the emerging technology achieves enough legitimacy, power, and resources in the firm to overtake, and ultimately displace, the incumbent competence. We develop an integrative model of technology transition that contributes to literature on resources, dynamic capabilities, competence-destroying change, and ambidexterity.

Suggested Citation

  • Erwin Danneels & Gianmario Verona & Bernardino Provera, 2018. "Overcoming the inertia of organizational competence: Olivetti’s transition from mechanical to electronic technology," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 27(3), pages 595-618.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:27:y:2018:i:3:p:595-618.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/icc/dtx049
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Krzywdzinski, Martin & Butollo, Florian, 2022. "Combining Experiential Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence. The Digital Transformation of a Traditional Machine-Building Company," management revue - Socio-Economic Studies, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, vol. 33(2), pages 161-184.
    2. Gwendolyn Lee & Janarthanan Nythruva, 2022. "A Mendelian perspective on strategic management: path-dependence and artificial selection in a search for sustainable energy," Journal of Organization Design, Springer;Organizational Design Community, vol. 11(3), pages 95-105, September.
    3. Krzywdzinski, Martin & Butollo, Florian, 2022. "Combining Experiential Knowledge and Artificial Intelligence. The Digital Transformation of a Traditional Machine-Building Company," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 33(2), pages 161-184.
    4. Saeed Khanagha & Shahzad (Shaz) Ansari & Sotirios Paroutis & Luciano Oviedo, 2022. "Mutualism and the dynamics of new platform creation: A study of Cisco and fog computing," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(3), pages 476-506, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • O32 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Management of Technological Innovation and R&D
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:indcch:v:27:y:2018:i:3:p:595-618.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/icc .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.