مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد سیستم نوآوری فناوری – الزویر 2019

Actors of an early stage technological innovation system (TIS) need to carefully attend to future developments given the high strategic uncertainty that often prevails in such systems. Such uncertainty is a reflection of the different technology categories that exist as well as the highly dynamic character of such systems in general. It is only gradually, as a result, that dominance of one technology category emerges against alternative categories and uncertainty is thereby reduced. Nonetheless, there has been limited attention so far to how researchers can operationalize some of the preliminary signals in order to anticipate which technology category is likely to emerge. In this paper, we therefore focus on how such early signals can be detected, i.e. by drawing upon patents and their underlying technology classification. Towards this end, we introduce two novel indicators based on the classification codes of patents: the Patent Trajectory (PTt) indicator and the Category Concentration (CCt) indicator. Joint application of both indicators enables us to operationalize the seminal concept of the technology cycle from Tushman and Rosenkopf (1992), which is specifically translated to the domain of TIS by distinguishing between the evolutionary phases of a TIS. To operationalize our novel methodological framework, we specifically employ the case of algae, ultimately concluding that this particular TIS tends to evolve in the direction of pharmaceutical applications. In a narrow sense, this framework can thus help to better understand the context of the TIS for algae. More significantly, however, the demonstrated ability of our approach to anticipate the evolution and formation of technological innovation systems signifies a worthwhile contribution for the larger domain of forecasting and strategic management.

Introduction

Technological innovation systems (TIS) have been used to make sense of the relevant actors (private firms, or firm sub-units, governmental and non-governmental agencies, universities, research facilities, venture capitalists, associations) as well as their interactions around a technology (Hekkert et al., 2007; Markard and Truffer, 2008). Understanding the evolution of a TIS and forecasting its potential formation has been the subject of a growing literature (Guo et al., 2012; Hekkert et al., 2007; Musiolik and Markard, 2011; Suurs et al., 2010). In this study we draw upon patents as a proxy for the level and direction of developments in a given TIS. In specific, this type of approach allows us to shed light on the types of technology categories that underlie and give shape to the formation of a TIS. In so doing, the use of patents in this way can help to offer prospective insight into a specific TIS, even as it continues to evolve. There are many reasons why such insight is useful. Firstly, we argue that an early anticipation of the technology categories that emerge and characterize the TIS is crucial for all actors within the TIS, specifically so that they can orient and develop their strategies about how to best respond in order to benefit their interests. Some actors, such as firms, firm sub-units, and research facilities, might be constrained by their resource positions and the necessity of specializing within complex innovation ecosystems, the ability to anticipate promising technology categories can enable these actors to set research priorities and minimize the risk of sunk costs in case of inattentive R&D strategies (Helfat, 1994; Narayanan and Chen, 2012; Tavassoli, 2015).