While the R&D intensive semiconductor tools industry has become pivotal to the advancement of technology and the growth of the downstream semiconductor chip manufacturing industry, this was not always the case. In the early stages of the industry, the chip manufacturers made their own tools...

This paper introduces an economically meaningful concept of generality of an input and defines a coefficient of technological generality, an intuitive measure of congruence in the R&D required for improving the quality of various adaptations of a general purpose input. It is shown in a...