Complex, Established “Legacy” Sectors: The Technology Revolutions That Do Not Happen

Abstract

Americans pride themselves on the scientific and technological prowess that has given rise to a steady stream of innovations in information and communications technology, along with medicine, agriculture, military, aerospace, and many other fields. For a quarter century, innovation policy in the United States has focused on the problems encountered by innovations in these and many other areas-especially on "the valley of death," the gap in implementing innovation that occurs as technologies bring new functions to create new markets and innovators move from research to late-stage development. In contrast, almost no research has focused on a different but critical problem in innovation: fitting new technologies into established economic sectors where innovation is needed and potentially transformational, and where the record of success is much more meager. This is the problem we confront in this article. Put another way, how do we fit discontinuous technologies into established sectoral paradigms?