Doctoral Dissertation Research: Dynamics of Technological Innovation: Incumbents' Adaptation and Capability Building on the Internet

本研究探讨了老牌企业如何适应技术创新，如互联网，以及这种创新的绩效影响。 具体的研究问题是：如何强烈做目前的创新努力，相对于过去的经验，影响一个公司的技术采用的速度，其技术采用的全面性，以及创新的回报？ 受过去创新经验影响而处于劣势的后来者如何通过加大创新力度来迎头赶上？ 尽管理论上一直强调动态能力对组织的适应性至关重要，但大多数实证研究都认为组织是沿着沿着路径和在过去经验确定的边界内演化的。 这项研究增加了新的层面的新兴能力，过去积累的经验，广泛研究的文献。 新兴能力反映了企业在决定采用新技术后如何组织创新。 本研究认为，创新是一个动态的过程，随着时间的推移不断演变，并评估在何种程度上，企业可以直接影响他们的创新过程与过去的经验（初始能力）决定的程度创新的路径和方向。 动态能力的观点是用来揭示企业能力如何出现，发展，并随着时间的推移而变化，以及企业如何整合和重新配置内部和外部的能力，以应对技术和环境的变化。 与电子商务经理的访谈和对新闻稿和行业期刊等档案数据源的审查，将有助于了解公司的采用过程。 此外，还对美国600多家金融机构负责互联网活动/电子商务业务的高级管理人员进行了大规模调查。虽然一开始很有希望，但许多创新从未获得回报，反而消耗了大量资源。因此，这项研究提供了重要的新的见解，企业创造价值的方式，通过合作和/或现有的新开发的能力的整合，并通过内部与外部的创新相关的能力开发。 此外，将研究后来者在创新实施过程中如何设法赶上的方法。本研究分析了企业在互联网背景下的各种适应策略和创新成果。 该研究将评估互联网实施决策相对于先前经验和采用时间的重要性，提出如何实施创新比何时采用更重要。 这项研究的结果最终将使组织更好地了解如何发展与创新相关的能力，提高创新绩效，以及如何避免实施降低创新收益可能性的战略。

This research examines how established firms adapt to technological innovations, such as the Internet, as well as the performance implications of such innovations. The specific research questions are: How strongly do current innovative efforts, relative to past experience, influence a firm's speed of technology adoption, the comprehensiveness of its technological adoption, and the returns to innovation? How can later adopters, disadvantaged by past innovation experience, catch up by increasing their innovative efforts? Although there has been strong theoretical emphasis on dynamic capabilities as critical to the adaptability of organizations, most empirical research has viewed organizations as evolving along paths and within boundaries determined by past experience. This study adds the new dimension of emerging capabilities to that of past-accumulated experience as widely studied in the literature. Emerging capabilities capture how firms organize for innovation once the decision for adoption has been made. This research views innovation as a dynamic process evolving over time and assesses the degree to which firms can directly influence their innovation process versus the degree to which past experience (initial capabilities) determines the path and direction of innovation. The dynamic capabilities perspective is used to reveal how firm capabilities emerge, develop, and change over time, as well as how firms integrate and reconfigure internal and external competencies to respond to technological and environmental change. Interviews with e-business managers and reviews of archival data sources, such as press releases and trade journals, will shed light on firms' adoption processes. Additionally, the project includes a large-scale survey of senior executives in charge of Internet activities/e-business operations at more than 600 U.S. financial institutions.Although promising at the outset, many innovations never pay off but rather consume enormous resources. This study thus offers important new insights into the way in which firms create value through collaboration and/or integration of existing with newly-developed capabilities, and through internal versus external innovation-related capability development. Moreover, ways in which later adopters manage to catch up during the innovation implementation process will be examined. This research analyzes firms' various adaptation strategies and innovation outcomes in the context of the Internet. The study will assess the importance of Internet implementation decisions relative to prior experience and timing of adoption, proposing that how an innovation is implemented matters more than when it is adopted. The findings from this research will ultimately provide organizations with a better understanding of how to develop innovation-related capabilities that improve innovation performance, and how to avoid implementation strategies that reduce the likelihood of yielding benefits from innovation.