Incumbent companies sometimes innovate and attempt to revitalise old technology-based products, in decline after technological change, by improvements of their technical performance and/or extensions of their lifetime into the market. The name of this innovation approach is "sailing ship...

The paper deals with the problem of how firms can innovate by exploiting strategic­ally both the change of technologies satisfying similar needs over time and the lag­gardness of some groups of users in adopting newer ones. This paper proposes a R&D approach based on the past. The integration...