Knowledge that Transforms

This paper investigates the career progress of scientists at ‘major and minor universities’ once they have chosen to participate in the development of an emerging field, posing three fundamental questions: (1) are scientists who are involved in the early stages of a field's development and who persist more likely to graduate from more prestigious universities? (2) In an emerging field, do graduates from prestigious universities pursue career paths that differ from the ones pursued by their peers from less prestigious institutions? (3) Are graduates from prestigious universities who choose academic careers more likely to find employment at prestigious universities? Empirical evidence is provided on the career progress of 373 scientists working in the field of neural networks, graduating from US universities. The prestige of a scientist's graduate school is found to be a significant indicator of the prestige of his or her academic appointment in the initial five years after graduation. Beyond five years, the effect of graduate school prestige becomes non-significant. Whether one entered the field before or after it gained widespread legitimacy in the scientific community apparently does not affect subsequent career progress in terms of institutional prestige.

In this paper we argue that the ‘standard’ view of the relationship between military and civilian technology is too simple and cannot account for the variety of historical experiences. In order to understand this relationship, attention must be paid to two things: that technologies have a lifecycle, in different parts of which different types of learning are important; and that the relationship between military and civilian sectors will change depending on the nature of the technology involved, in particular whether it is a process or a product technology. In addition, the standard view does not pay heed to the fact that there are specific organizational requirements to realize any potential cross-benefits. We describe a framework with which to analyse the various features of the relationship taking into account these considerations.

Product architecture is the scheme by which the function of a product is allocated to physical components. This paper further defines product architecture, provides a typology of product architectures, and articulates the potential linkages between the architecture of the product and five areas of managerial importance: (1) product change; (2) product variety; (3) component standardization; (4) product performance; and (5) product development management. The paper is conceptual and foundational, synthesizing fragments from several different disciplines, including software engineering, design theory, operations management and product development management. The paper is intended to raise awareness of the far-reaching implications of the architecture of the product, to create a vocabulary for discussing and addressing the decisions and issues that are linked to product architecture, and to identify and discuss specific trade-offs associated with the choice of a product architecture.

A total of 164 innovation projects were sampled in five industries to determine the effect, if any, of government policy on their conduct and outcome. Sixty-six of the projects had at the time of the study achieved commercial success, in the view of the firms involved. Fifty-one were considered failures, while 47 were still underway. Nearly half of the projects had been affected by one or more mechanisms of government policy. There is no indication that this degree of government involvement has either increased or decreased in recent years. There is also no indication that government involvement influenced success or failure, in any way. It does appear, however, that technology has been relatively successful in coping with government regulation in the area of safety, pollution control, etc., since projects affected by these policies were significantly more likely to be successful.

A sample of one hundred and eleven scientific instrument innovations was studied to determine the roles of instrument users and instrument manufacturers in the innovation processes which culminated in the successful commercialization of those instruments. Our key finding was that approximately 80% of the innovations judged by users to offer them a significant increment in functional utility were in fact invented, prototyped and first field-tested by users of the instrument rather than by an instrument manufacturer. The role of the first commercial manufacturer of the innovative instrument in all such cases was restricted, we found, to the performance of product engineering work on the user prototype (work which improved the prototype's reliability, ‘manufacturability’, and convenience of operation, while leaving its principles of operation intact) and to the manufacture and sale of the resulting innovative product. Thus, this research provides the interesting picture of an industry widely regarded as innovative in which the firms comprising the industry are not in themselves necessarily innovative, but rather — in 80% of the innovations sampled — only provide the product engineering and manufacturing function for innovative instrument users. We term the innovation pattern observed in scientific instruments a ‘user dominated’ one and suggest that such a pattern may play a major role in numerous industries.

Why some firms die while others survive? Survival has long been recognized as a basic goal for a manufacturing firm. At least in the long term, survival should be related to various measures of performance, such as market share and profitability. Advocates of population ecology have argued that life chances of organizations are affected by population density at the time of founding. According to this argument, organizations founded during periods of intense competition will have persistently higher age-specific rates of mortality than those founded during periods with lower numbers of competitors. At least for the case of manufacturing firms, there may be more profound causes than competitive turmoil that explain a firm's survival chances. These have to do with the evolution of technology in an industry. Population density may only be a reflection of underlying driving forces based on technological change that determine the form and level of competition, the attractiveness of entry, and ultimately the structure of an industry.