This article investigates whether firms react to a radical technological substitution threat by a deliberate acceleration of innovation in their existing technolgy - the "sailing ship effect". It has been argued that the effect is both significant and widespread and warrants a reexamination of...

This paper compares documented corporate patent practice with the way the patent institution has been modelled in economics and management writing. In particular, there is common confusion of the patent’s role as a temporary exclusive development right (correct) and the idea that the patent is...

This paper reviews the relationship between financial evaluation and control techniques and innovative activity in a range of contexts. The relationship is broadly conceived to include both the financial techniques developed and deployed within the firm and the evaluative behaviour of financial...

This paper is a review of efforts to summarise long-term technological development in the management literature in terms of ‘paths’ or trajectories. They are most useful as a way of understanding the general search for economies of scale, but the management value of such ideas is compromised...

This paper takes a simple definition of competition as a threat to established revenues. It then develops this idea as it applies to technological change through a series of illustrative examples. "Technological competition" occurs only when one technology substitutes for another, for a given...