Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries (Innovation and Technology in the World Economy) - Hardcover

Funk, Jeffrey L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804783853 ISBN 13: 9780804783859

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries explores why new industries emerge at specific moments in time and in certain countries. Part I shows that technologies which experience "exponential" improvements in cost and performance have a greater chance of becoming new industries. When "low-end" discontinuities incur exponential improvements, they often displace the dominant technologies and become "disruptive" innovations. Part II explores this phenomenon and instances in which discontinuities spawn new industries because they impact higher-level systems. Part III addresses a different set of questions-ones that consider the challenges of new industries for firms and governments. Part IV uses ideas from the previous chapters to analyze the present and future of selected technologies.

Based on analyses of many industries, including those with an electronic and clean energy focus, this book challenges the conventional wisdom that performance dramatically rises following the emergence of a new technology, that costs fall due to increases in cumulative production, and that low-end innovations automatically become disruptive ones.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Jeff Funk is Associate Professor of Technology Management at the National University of Singapore. He has consulted for numerous firms, particularly ones associated with the mobile communications industry. In 2004, he received the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award for his research on the mobile phone industry.

Jeff Funk is Associate Professor of Technology Management at the National University of Singapore. He has consulted for numerous firms, particularly ones associated with the mobile communications industry. In 2004, he received the NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award for his research on the mobile phone industry.

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Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries

By JEFFREY L. FUNK

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8385-9

Contents

List of Illustrations...................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................xiii1 Introduction..........................................................................................1Part I. What Determines the Potential for New Technologies and Thus New Industries?.....................192 Technology Paradigm...................................................................................213 Geometrical Scaling...................................................................................41Part II. When Do Technological Discontinuities Emerge?..................................................614 Computers.............................................................................................675 Audio and Video Recording and Playback Equipment......................................................826 Semiconductors........................................................................................99Part III. Opportunities and Challenges for Firms and Governments........................................1177 Competition in New Industries.........................................................................1198 Different Industries, Different Challenges............................................................131Part IV. Thinking about the Future......................................................................1439 Electronics and Electronic Systems....................................................................14510 Clean Energy.........................................................................................158Appendix: Research Methodology..........................................................................199Notes...................................................................................................203References..............................................................................................223Index...................................................................................................241

Chapter One

What Determines the Potential for New Technologies and Thus New Industries?

Understanding the potential for new technologies is highly problematic. Consider, for example, nuclear power. On September 16, 1954, Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in a speech to the National Association of Science Writers, said, "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." Although there is some disagreement about whether he was referring to nuclear fission or nuclear fusion, children born in the 1950s still do not have access to energy that is too cheap to meter, and it is highly unlikely that those born in the 21st century will have it. In fact, the opposite may be true.

Similar examples can be found in a book written in 1967 by Herman Kahn, considered one of the greatest visionaries of his time, and Anthony Weiner. Kahn and Wiener described technologies they believed would be widely used by the year 2000. In 2002, Richard Albright created a panel of experts to assess these forecasts. It was concluded that fewer than 50 percent of the forecasted innovations had occurred before the end of the 20th century. By sector, a larger percentage were correct in computers and communication (80 percent) than in aerospace (20 percent) and infrastructure and transportation (30 percent). Consistent with this book's analysis, Albright concluded that the greater accuracy in forecasts for computers and communication was the result of greater improvements in the underlying technologies for them, such as integrated circuits (ICs), magnetic storage, and optical fiber. On the other hand, the lower forecasting accuracy for aerospace was the result of exaggerated hype generated by the Apollo program. Exaggerated hype may now be occurring with electric vehicles and other clean energies.

Part I describes the concepts of technology paradigms and geometrical scaling and how they can be used to better assess the potential of new technologies. Chapter 2 provides an overview of technology paradigms, while Chapter 3 focuses on a key aspect, geometrical scaling. Although any method is prone to exaggeration and hype such as occurred in some of Kahn and Wiener's examples, using a technology paradigm requires gathering performance and cost /price data and considering both the components that make up a technological system and the concepts that form the basis of the technology whose potential is being assessed.

For example, if Lewis Strauss had analyzed the technology paradigm for nuclear power in 1954, he would have noted several key things: (1) that boilers, turbines, and generators are needed for nuclear fission just as they are for fossil-fired power; (2) that the benefits from increasing the scale of boilers, turbines, and generator technologies had almost been attained by the 1950s; (3) that, although nuclear fuel has higher energy densities than do other fuels, its costs of extraction, shipping, and processing on a weight or volume basis are also higher, for safety reasons; and (4) that the costs of plant construction are higher for nuclear fuel, also for safety reasons. These facts should have alerted him to the nuclear energy's potential limitations.

Chapter Two

Technology Paradigm

This chapter summarizes and contrasts the paradigms for six basic technologies and more than 35 "subtechnologies" (see the Appendix for methodology). Building from Giovanni Dosi's characterization of a technology paradigm, it does this in terms of (1) a technology's basic concepts or principles and the trade-offs that are defined by them; (2) the directions of advance within these trade-offs, which are defined by one or more technological trajectories; (3) the potential limits to these trajectories and their paradigms; and (4) the roles of components and scientific knowledge in these limits. The concepts or principles that form the basis of a technology define the trade-offs between cost and various dimensions of performance, and their characterization and implementation are supported by advances in science. This book distinguishes between a physical phenomenon, which exists independently of humans, and the use of a concept or principle to exploit it for a specific purpose. Advances in our understanding of a physical phenomenon form a base of knowledge that helps us find new concepts or principles, and these in turn help us find better product and process designs.

This chapter primarily focuses on the second and third items listed above and shows that there are four main methods of achieving advances along a technological trajectory: (1) improving the efficiency with which basic concepts and their underlying physical phenomena are exploited; (2) radical new processes; (3) geometrical scaling; and (4) improvements in "key" components. Since Chapter 3 focuses on scaling and radical process improvements as part of scaling in production equipment, this chapter focuses on the other two methods, the first of which includes finding materials that better exploit basic concepts and their underlying physical phenomena. Finding better materials (and radical new processes, which are not discussed in this chapter) is particularly important for the low levels in a nested hierarchy of electronic subsystems,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804783853
• ISBN 13: 9780804783859
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande