Underinvestment and Incompetence as Responses to Radical Innovation: Evidence from the Photolithographic Alignment Equipment Industry
利用光刻对准设备行业所有企业研发项目的完整数据，发现老牌企业在利用重大创新方面系统性地不如新进入者有效，结果支持投资行为理论，但强调需要发展组织能力的严格理论。
Radical innovation often drastically undermines established firms.Despite evidence suggesting that these failures are driven by organizational failure, formal research has focused upon the conditions under which established firms will fail through underinvestment, rather than through bureaucratic inertia or incompetence.Using an unusually comprehensive data set that includes data about every research project initiated by every firm in the photolithographic alignment industry, I show that incumbents were systematically less effective than entrants in their attempts to exploit major innovation.The results are consistent with existing theories of investment behavior, but highlight an urgent need to develop rigorous theories of organizational capability.in the sense first advanced by Arrow (1962), who suggested that incremental innovations are relatively "minor" innovations that continue to compete actively with the previous generation of the technology, while radical innovations are so great an advance that the older technology is driven from the market.Formally, he suggested that the optimal monopoly price of a radical innovation is less than the marginal production cost of the previous technology.Models in this tradition have been developed by a number of other authors.(Baldwin and Scott, (1987), and Reinganum (1989), provide excellent overviews of this literature.)In general, they assume that incumbents and entrants have equivalent capabilities, and therefore that their research efforts will be equally effective.They thus suggest that radical technological change so often displaces established firms because established firms on average invest less than entrants in its development.This conclusion is in contrast to the perspective developed by organizational theorists such as Bums and Stalker (1966), Galbraith (1973), and Tushman and Anderson (1986), and by economists such as Arrow (1974), Kreps and Spence (1983) and Nelson and Winter (1982).Authors in this tradition model firms as entities whose limited information processing abilities force them to develop organizational structures and specialized information processing assets that are specialized to the market and the technology in which they compete.These assets are a source of advantage as long as the firm's environment remains stable, and partially explain why established firms are so successful in their attempts to introduce and exploit minor or incremental innovation, but they handicap established firms once they are forced to respond to radically different markets or technologies.These authors define radical innovation as innovation that presents quite different organizational and information processing challenges because its exploitation requires the understanding and integration of wholly different kinds of information (Tushman and Anderson, 1986).Entrants to the industry either build new organizations optimized to develop this kind of information or enter from related industries where they have already gained experience with the new technology.Organizational theorists suggest that incumbent firms are unable to duplicate entrant behavior through "bureaucratic inertia," or the inability to recognize the nature of the threat with which the organization is faced and to reorient themselves in time (Daft, 1982), while Arrow, and other researchers with similar perspectives, suggest that incumbents choose not to duplicate entrant behavior because of the sunk costs represented by their existing information