Post-innovation performance: technological development and competition

The advantage a firm gains from success fully bringing a new product to the market is often shortlived. Competitors will produce improved versions to rival the original, sometimes using an alternative technology which is itself being constantly improved. Several years may pass before the superior ity of one product, or technology, is shown in the market. This book looks at the strategies followed by successfully inno vating firms through the life-cycle of new products in response to improving com petition and changing market conditions.

The first part of the book draws upon recent theories of technical change to put forward a new framework linking together the long term development of technologies with their market environment in an attempt to explain why particular firms emerge as dominant. This approach is linked to the second part, which examines what has happened to thirty-five firms that won the Queen's Award to Industry for technological innovation in 1966 and 1967.