Architectural Evolution of Nascent Industries: Evidence from Solid-State Lighting

Abstract

My dissertation is a study of firms’ strategic differences and the performance consequences of these differences in nascent industries. I relax the implicit assumption in the existing literature that a technological breakthrough is exogenous, and provide theoretical and empirical accounts of knowledge evolution before a new technology gets commercialized. In Chapter 2, I highlight the evolution of a technology at the industry level and argue that there exists a pre-commercialization technology life cycle. I develop a series of propositions related to the technology’s architectural evolution during the pre-commercialization phase, and show that an emerging architecture becomes fully integrated before the inception of a new market. In Chapter 3, I shift the focus to the firm level, and compare the pre-commercialization search strategies of market incumbents facing a technological obsolescence to those of technology incumbents disrupting an existing market. I show that these two groups of incumbent firms invest heavily in an emerging technology even before the market takes shape, and that they engage in different search strategies, specifically in the degree to which they integrate or modularize the knowledge about individual technology components across two stages of a pre-commercialization life cycle. In Chapter 4, I argue that such pre-commercialization strategies have post-commercialization consequences. This dynamic view suggests that a select group of established organizations enter a new product market and the heterogeneity in their pre-entry experiences has direct consequences for the product’s initial performance. Throughout, this study uses the emergence of the solid-state lighting (SSL) market as an empirical context.