Entry, Learning, and Industry Evolution

开展了三个项目，涉及引导企业进入新产业和使产业集中在狭小地理区域的条件。第一个项目分析了导致现有公司的员工离开并在同一行业创办竞争公司的情况。现有公司的员工被认为在他们为雇主工作的专业领域学习有用的技术和营销知识，他们利用这些知识创办自己的公司。表现更好的公司被认为是更丰富的学习环境，导致它们催生更多、表现更好的员工初创公司。因此，员工初创企业有助于将知识传播给新的组织，从而增加行业竞争对手的实力。这些想法是通过使用之前NSF项目中收集的关于汽车和激光行业所有进入者的数据来测试的。对于每个行业，对催生更多员工初创公司的公司类型、有利于此类初创公司的市场条件以及员工初创公司与其创始人先前经验之间的关系进行了各种预测。第二个项目分析了一个罕见的偶然事件的潜力，即几个非常成功的早期进入者在同一地区的位置，以深刻影响行业地理结构的演变。这可以通过第一个项目中设想的员工启动过程来实现。如果员工创业推动了地区集聚，这意味着促进行业集聚的地区公共政策努力应该把重点放在促进员工创业上。使用第一个汽车行业项目中汇编的数据来检验员工初创企业在地区行业集中度中的重要性，该项目变得高度集中在密歇根州底特律。每一家汽车制造商的位置和传统都被追踪，以测试底特律制造商的成功在多大程度上集中在那些直接或尽管其他员工初创公司可以追溯到四家最成功的早期汽车进入者：Olds Motor Works、凯迪拉克、别克和福特的公司，所有这些公司都位于底特律地区。最后一个项目探讨了从经验中学习如何引导公司扩大他们在行业内开展的活动的曲目。据推测，随着公司了解一个行业的核心技术，他们会将努力扩展到更难掌握的新活动中。这种观点可以解释公司成长的模式，也可以解释为什么行业领导者倾向于生产最广泛的行业产品。它还意味着，更老、更合格的公司是第一个多元化进入创新创造的新行业领域的公司，这与最近关于创新如何导致行业领导者更替的理论形成对比。使用汽车和激光行业的数据以及在同一NSF项目中开发的轮胎行业的部分历史数据对该理论进行了验证。实证检验考察了哪些创新对行业领先企业构成了最大的挑战，哪些创新加强了行业领导者的地位。

Three projects concerning the conditions that lead firms to enter new industries and that cause industries to be concentrated in narrow geographic regions are conducted. The first project analyzes the circumstances that lead employees of existing firms to leave and start competing firms in the same industry. Employees of incumbent firms are assumed to learn useful technical and marketing knowledge in the specialized domains in which they work for their employers, which they exploit in starting their own firms. Better performing firms are assumed to be richer learning environments, leading them to spawn more and better-performing employee startups. Employee startups thus serve to diffuse knowledge to new organizations, thereby increasing the strength of the competitors in an industry. These ideas are tested using data that builds on data collected in a prior NSF project on all entrants into the automobile and laser industries. For each industry, various predictions concerning the types of firms that spawn more employee startups, the market conditions that are conducive to such startups, and the relationship between employee startups and the prior experiences of their founders are tested.The second project analyzes the potential of a rare chance event, namely the location of a few very successful early entrants in the same region, to profoundly affect the evolution of the geographic structure of an industry. This can occur through the employee startup process envisioned in the first project. If employee startups drive regional concentrations, it implies that regional public policy efforts to promote industry concentrations should focus on facilitating employee startups. The importance of employee startups in regional industry concentrations is tested using the data compiled in the first project on the automobile industry, which became heavily concentrated around Detroit, Michigan. The location and heritage of every automobile producer is traced to test the extent to which the success of the Detroit producers was concentrated in firms that either directly or though other employee startups can be traced back to four of the most successful early automobile entrants, Olds Motor Works, Cadillac, Buick, and Ford, all of which located in the Detroit area. The last project explores how learning from experience leads firms to expand the repertoire of activities they conduct within industries. It is conjectured that as firms learn about the core technologies of an industry, they expand their efforts into new activities that are more challenging to master. This perspective can account for patterns in the way firms grow and also why the leaders of industries tend to produce the broadest array of the industry's products. It also implies that older and more qualified firms are the first to diversify into new industry domains created by innovations, which contrasts with recent theories about how innovations can lead to turnover in the leaders of an industry. The theory is tested using the data for the automobile and laser industries and also using data for part of the history of the tire industry developed in the same prior NSF project. The empirical examination probes the kinds of innovations that pose the greatest challenges to an industry's leading firms versus those that reinforce the positions of the industry's leaders.