This paper studies strategic industry dynamics of creative destruction in which firms and technologies experience turnover. Theories predict cannibalization between existing and new products delays incumbents’ innovation, whereas preemptive motives accelerate it. Incumbents’ cost...

How far should an industry be allowed to consolidate when competition and innovation are endogenous? We develop a stochastically alternating-move game of dynamic oligopoly, and estimate it using data from the hard disk drive industry, in which a dozen global players consolidated into only three...

We assess the usefulness of patent statistics as an indicator of innovation, using a direct measure of innovation in the hard disk industry (1976--98). Three findings emerge: (1) Patents "predict" innovations better than a random guess, and a simple refinement makes them more useful; (2)...

Where do firms innovate? Mapping their locations and directions in technological space is challenging due to its high dimensionality. We propose a new method to characterize firms’ inventive activities via topological data analysis (TDA) that represents high-dimensional data in a shape graph....

We propose a new method to characterize firms' inventive activities via topological data analysis (TDA) that represents high-dimensional data in a shape graph. Applying this method to 333 major firms' patents in 1976—2005 reveals substantial heterogeneity: some firms remain undifferentiated;...