IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cri/cespri/wp195.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Striving for a Large Market: Evidence from a General Purpose Technology in Action

Author

Listed:
  • Grid Thoma

    (University of Camerino, Italy and Cespri, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.)

Abstract

Several scholars have tried to focus on growth accounting of specific examples of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). But, what are the factors that might make a General Purpose Technology succeed or fail once the invention has been "triggered"? This paper is a preliminary answer to this question and attempts to study GPTs from an ex-ante perspective trying to understand what is the behaviour and performance of the producer firms and what the factors are that can favour or hamper their diffusion in the application sectors. The paper follows a historical perspective on a control technology, introduced in the last few decades by a Silicon Valley start-up company.

Suggested Citation

  • Grid Thoma, 2006. "Striving for a Large Market: Evidence from a General Purpose Technology in Action," KITeS Working Papers 195, KITeS, Centre for Knowledge, Internationalization and Technology Studies, Universita' Bocconi, Milano, Italy, revised Dec 2006.
    • Handle: RePEc:cri:cespri:wp195
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: ftp://ftp.unibocconi.it/pub/RePEc/cri/papers/WP195Thoma.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Vincent Mangematin & Khalid Errabi & Caroline Gauthier, 2011. "Large players in the nanogame: dedicated nanotech subsidiaries or distributed nanotech capabilities?," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 36(6), pages 640-664, December.
    2. Mario Benassi & Elena Grinza & Francesco Rentocchini & Laura Rondi, 2022. "Patenting in 4IR technologies and firm performance [Robots and jobs: evidence from US labor markets]," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 31(1), pages 112-136.
    3. Mario Benassi & Elena Grinza & Francesco Rentocchini & Laura Rondi, 2020. "Going Revolutionary: The Impact of 4IR Technology Development on Firm Performance," SPRU Working Paper Series 2020-08, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    4. Marco Cucculelli & Valentina Peruzzi, 2020. "Post-crisis firm survival, business model changes, and learning: evidence from the Italian manufacturing industry," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 459-474, February.
    5. Marco S. Giarratana & Martina Pasquini & Juan Santaló, 2021. "Leveraging synergies versus resource redeployment: Sales growth and variance in product portfolios of diversified firms," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(12), pages 2245-2272, December.
    6. Gambardella, Alfonso, 2023. "Private and social functions of patents: Innovation, markets, and new firms," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 52(7).
    7. Iritié, B. G. Jean Jacques, 2017. "Innovation clusters effects on adoption of a general purpose technology under uncertainty," EconStor Preprints 180668, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    8. Raffaele Conti & Alfonso Gambardella & Elena Novelli, 2019. "Specializing in Generality: Firm Strategies When Intermediate Markets Work," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(1), pages 126-150, February.
    9. Slowak, André P., 2009. "Market fields structure & dynamics in industrial automation," FZID Discussion Papers 02-2009, University of Hohenheim, Center for Research on Innovation and Services (FZID).
    10. Lehrer, Mark & Banerjee, Preeta M. & Wang, I. Kim, 2017. "When the sky is the limit on scale: From temporal to multiplicative scaling in process-based technologies," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 151-159.
    11. Bronwyn H. Hall & Grid Thoma & Salvatore Torrisi, 2009. "Financial Patenting in Europe," NBER Working Papers 14714, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Gambardella, Alfonso & Conti, Raffaele & Novelli, Elena, 2018. "Specializing in Generality: Firm Strategies When Intermediate Markets Work," CEPR Discussion Papers 12782, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    13. Appio, Francesco Paolo & Martini, Antonella & Fantoni, Gualtiero, 2017. "The light and shade of knowledge recombination: Insights from a general-purpose technology," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 125(C), pages 154-165.
    14. Sophie Hooge & Olga Kokshagina & Pascal Le Masson & Kevin Levillain & Benoit Weil & Vincent Fabreguettes & Nathalie Popiolek, 2014. "Designing generic technologies in Energy Research: learning from two CEA technologies for double unknown management," Post-Print hal-00987214, HAL.
    15. Ingrid Ott & Simone Vannuccini, 2023. "Invention in Times of Global Challenges: A Text-Based Study of Remote Sensing and Global Public Goods," Economies, MDPI, vol. 11(8), pages 1-24, August.
    16. Bonnin Roca, Jaime & O'Sullivan, Eoin, 2020. "Seeking coherence between barriers to manufacturing technology adoption and innovation policy," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 230(C).
    17. Bojovic, Neva, 2022. "Strategic framing of enabling technologies: Insights from firms digitizing smell and taste," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(3).
    18. Barirani, Ahmad & Beaudry, Catherine & Agard, Bruno, 2017. "Can universities profit from general purpose inventions? The case of Canadian nanotechnology patents," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 271-283.
    19. Daniela Baglieri & Gianni Lorenzoni, 2014. "Closing the distance between academia and market: experimentation and user entrepreneurial processes," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 39(1), pages 52-74, February.
    20. Cantner, Uwe & Vannuccini, Simone, 2021. "Pervasive technologies and industrial linkages: Modeling acquired purposes," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 386-399.
    21. Ajay Bhaskarabhatla, 2016. "The Moderating Role of Submarket Dynamics on the Product Customization–Firm Survival Relationship," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 27(4), pages 1049-1064, August.
    22. Gambardella, Alfonso & Giarratana, Marco S., 2013. "General technological capabilities, product market fragmentation, and markets for technology," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(2), pages 315-325.
    23. Simone Vannuccini & Ekaterina Prytkova, 2021. "Artificial Intelligence’s New Clothes? From General Purpose Technology to Large Technical System," SPRU Working Paper Series 2021-02, SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex Business School.
    24. Arora, Ashish & Gambardella, Alfonso, 2010. "The Market for Technology," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 641-678, Elsevier.
    25. Bresnahan, Timothy, 2010. "General Purpose Technologies," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 761-791, Elsevier.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Industrial Organization; Technological Change.;

    JEL classification:

    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets
    • L24 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Contracting Out; Joint Ventures
    • L8 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services
    • O31 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
    • O34 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:cri:cespri:wp195. 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: Valerio Sterzi (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.kites.unibocconi.it/ .

    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.