On the role of dynamic leveraging in periods of discontinuous technological substitution

Starting from the relevance of discontinuous technological substitution and the following possible criticalities in dealing with emerging technology, this thesis takes place with the aim of tackle the open issues concerning how successfully enter in a emerging technological domain and, in doing that, how to fruitfully leverage previous technological experience. Coherently with what introduce above aim I developed the thesis in two main parts. In the first parts, first of all, I give a general overview of the research projects I developed, mainly focusing on the research problems, research questions specifically addressed and the main contributions offer by the single papers. Second, I describe the methodology I used for development of the empirical analysis, with a specific focus on: the characteristic of the empirical settings and the reason of its choice; the kind of data collected; the procedures for develop the final dataset; the specification of the model used; the main variables used in the analysis used until nowadays. In the second parts I develop the focal papers of the thesis, which specifically concern the following issues: • What explain the success in an emerging technological domain? Our idea is that the success in an emerging technological domain may be explained by the characteristics of knowledge that firms develop and by the implemented processes of knowledge leveraging. Starting from the assumption that technological distance may differ on the base of knowledge proximity to the technological paradigm of the industry, we differentiate knowledge developed in terms of affected technological domains that knowledge is more likely to impact (i.e. knowledge specificity, knowledge complementarity in industry-­‐related domains and knowledge complementarity in industry-­‐unrelated domains). Base on the opposite effects that, by technological novelty and learning processes, technological distance has on innovative performance of new knowledge, this paper is aimed at the comprehension of the extent to which the specificity, rather 8 than the breadth of the knowledge developed, may affect firms’ technological performance in an emerging domain. Finally, a recent literature discussion has put in evidence the difference between firms’ previous technological experience and the dynamic firms’ capacity, in the face of a discontinuous technological shift, to actual leverage the output of this experience that is the knowledge developed by the firm. Therefore the second main focus concerns the identification of the more fruitful leveraging process firms may actually carry on during the development of new knowledge in an emerging domain. • There is a need for solve what different streams of literature have jointly identified as a paradox: in the face of a discontinuous technological shift, incumbents’ competence endowments constitute the main obstacle, and at the same time, the main reason for their success. Extant literature has considered the effect of discontinuous technological shifts on firm competencies in a dichotomous manner. In order to address the apparent lack of conclusive results in this field, there is a need for a more nuanced perspective. Resolving the apparent contradiction between different existing literature streams calls for an explanation of the specific circumstances under which the leveraging of existing competencies constitute an advantage and when they instead are negative. In order to allow for this, we introduce the concept of architectural depth, which extends and nuances the role played by product architecture in periods of discontinuous technological change. Even in the case of technological substitution of a core component, some competencies may need to be renewed or created ex novo, whereas others can be maintained and leveraged. It is proposed that the ability of incumbents to implement a process of competence leveraging impacting on the way in which firms reorganize their competence endowments, can also be considered a manifestation of dynamic capabilities. Inresponse to the bulk of existing studies underlining the negative effect of drawing upon established firms’ competencies, we posit that competence leveraging under specific conditions can become a source of competitive advantage rather than a 9 constraint, and that the possibility of doing so is related to the architectural depth of incumbents’ product architectures.