What Will the Future Bring? Dominance, Technology Expectations, and Radical Innovation

Abstract

Are dominant firms laggards or leaders at innovation? The answers to this question are conflicting and controversial. In an attempt to resolve conflicting answers to this question, the authors argue that dominance is a multifaceted construct in which individual facets result in differing (and countervailing) propensities to innovate. To identify the overall effects of dominance, it is necessary to consider the effects of these facets taken together. The authors also study a hitherto ignored yet important driver of innovation, technology expectations, and show that managers have widely divergent expectations of the same new technology. Furthermore, even when their expectations are the same, managers of dominant firms display investment behavior at odds with their counterparts at nondominant firms. The authors use a triangulation of research methods and combine insights from lab studies with those from field interviews, archival data, and a survey of bricks-and-mortar banks’ responses to Internet banking.