Knowledge, firm boundaries, and innovation: Mitigating the incumbent's curse during radical technological change
研究了企业组织如何影响其应对激进技术变革的能力，发现同时拥有内部上游知识和下游市场联系的企业在新兴技术中成为创新领导者，但在旧技术中落后。
We explore the relationship between a firm's organization and its ability to face a radical technological change. We suggest that, during such a change, the presence of both in‐house upstream knowledge and downstream market linkages, within a firm's boundary, has its advantages. We test our predictions in the context of the robotics industry where manufacturers of mechanically controlled “brawny” robots, which were valued mainly for their payload capacity, faced the advent of electrically controlled “brainy” robots that emphasized accuracy and repeatability. We find that “preadapted” firms—the ones with prior relevant technological knowledge and with access to internal users of “brainy” robots—were the innovation leaders in the emerging new technology but were laggards in the old technology . Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.