David A. Hounshell

The nature, sources, and consequences of firm differences in the early history of the semiconductor industry

Four entrants into the early semiconductor industry—Sprague Electric, Motorola, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, and Fairchild Semiconductor—displayed remarkably different performance and behavior. Case studies of the firms demonstrate that the key differences stemmed from the firms’ technological goals and activities and their abilities to integrate R&D and manufacturing. These differences can in turn be related to the firms’ origins and their different conditions upon entry into the semiconductor industry, which had lasting effects due to constraints on change. While the cases offer limited prescriptions for management, they underscore the importance of technological diversity for an industry’s rate of technical advance and, in turn, public policies that support such diversity. Copyright

Continual Corporate Entrepreneurial Search for Long-Term Growth

This paper examines how established firms conduct continual entrepreneurial search for possibilities for long-term growth. Drawing on comprehensive internal documents of the DuPont Company over a 20-year period, we develop a search process that is a departure from frequent depictions of search as local or random. Longitudinal field data show that corporate entrepreneurs follow a moving, anchored search for growth possibilities. Employing this framework as lens, we develop propositions. We find that corporate entrepreneurs are more likely to conduct search in new domains following events that cause them to expect future performance to change significantly and lastingly. This is in contrast to the literature that has typically modeled the initiation of search as a response to poor past performance. Because new domains are unexplored territories for corporate entrepreneurs, they utilize transitional levers that they perceive will facilitate the move from existing domains to new ones. These perceived transitional levers, however, typically prove inaccurate or incomplete. Content within domains is searched using anchors whose locations and numbers change. The combination of search process and content searched influences the particular growth possibilities discovered and created. Search and pursuit of growth possibilities is accompanied by the creation of new knowledge and new capabilities.

Hughesian history of technology and Chandlerian business history: Parallels, departures, and critics

Thomas P. Hughes and Alfred D. Chandler have exerted enormous influence in their respective fields of the history of technology and business history. This essay explores the development of these two scholars and their work, highlights the interaction of Hughes and Chandler and their ideas, and indentifies the ideas and issues on which they agree and disagree. The problem of technological determinism has attended both scholars’ work and has become one of the principal avenues by which their work has been criticized. This essay argues that the rise of social contraction of technology and its cousins stemmed in large measure from political concerns about human agency in historical change in general and the problem of technological determinism in particular. Both social constructivism and historians’ embrace of the critique of American manufacturing methods launched by Piore and Sabel in their 1984 book, The Second Industrial Divide, have become principal means by which some historians have sought to lessen t...

The Effect of Government Actions on Environmental Technology Innovation: Applications to the Integrated Assessment of Carbon Sequestration Technologies

This project seeks to improve the ability of integrated assessment models (IA) to incorporate changes in technology, especially environmental technologies, cost and performance over time. In this report, we present results of research that examines past experience in controlling other major power plant emissions that might serve as a reasonable guide to future rates of technological progress in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) systems. In particular, we focus on U.S. and worldwide experience with sulfur dioxide (SO{sub 2}) and nitrogen oxide (NO{sub x}) control technologies over the past 30 years, and derive empirical learning rates for these technologies. The patterns of technology innovation are captured by our analysis of patent activities and trends of cost reduction over time. Overall, we found learning rates of 11% for the capital costs of flue gas desulfurization (FGD) system for SO{sub 2} control, and 13% for selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems for NO{sub x} control. We explore the key factors responsible for the observed trends, especially the development of regulatory policies for SO{sub 2} and NO{sub x} control, and their implications for environmental control technology innovation.

Commentary/On the Discipline of the History of American Technology

The study of the history of American technology may follow one of two possible paths in the near future. By considering technology as a social phenomenon, the field may continue to broaden its perspective and become an important part of the larger study of social history. Or, seeing social history as an overworked field with too many tillers, it may narrow its focus and concentrate on the internal dimensions and character of technology itself. Since technology is an important part of American civilization and since the history of technology is still a relatively new field, all historians should be interested in knowing how historians of technology have arrived at this critical juncture and the implications of the two paths before them. Viewed institutionally, the history of technology appears to be one of the healthiest of the newer fields in the historical profession. Since its creation in 1958, the Society for the History of Technology has grown steadily in membership, and its quarterly journal, Technology and Culture, quickly achieved (and has maintained) an outstanding reputation for its scholarship, variety of articles, and wide array of authors. At American universities an increasing number of academic appointments are being made in the history of technology. In fact, jobs are going unfilled for lack of properly trained historians of technology or are being filled with historians from other fields, such as the history of science. To educate historians of technology, several graduate programs have been created, and this number is growing. Generally, grants, fellowships, and other sources of funding are readily available to historians of technology, and leading university presses as well as a few commercial houses have shown marked interest in publishing manuscripts on the history of technology. These signs of the health and vigor of the field are also reflected in the scholarship published in the field during the last two decades. Works on

Experience Curves for Environmental Technology and Their Relationship to Government Actions

We seek to improve the ability of integrated assessment models (IA) to incorporate changes in CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) technology cost and performance over time. This paper presents results of new research that examines past experience in controlling other major power plant emissions that might serve as a reasonable guide to future rates of technological progress in CCS systems. In particular, we focus on U.S. and worldwide experience with sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) control technologies over the past 30 years.

Spinning Tales about Japanese Cotton Spinning: Saxonhouse (1974) and Lessons from New Data

We revisit the story of technology adoption and diffusion in Japans Meiji-era cotton spinning industry, the study of which was pioneered by Gary Saxonhouse (1974). Using a novel data set and modern methodology, we argue that both the ease with which the best technology diffused and the role of “slavish imitation†in this process may have been overstated. We find an important role played by market competition, including asset reallocation. Our analyses provide richer insights into the complex phenomena of technology diffusion, innovation, and economic growth.

Effects of government incentives on wind?innovation in the United States

In the United States, as elsewhere, state and federal governments have considered or implemented a range of policies to create more sustainable energy generation systems in response to concerns over climate change, security of fuel supply, and environmental impacts. These policies include both regulatory instruments such as renewable portfolio standards (RPSs) and market incentives such as tax credits. While these policies are primarily geared towards increasing renewable generation capacity, they can indirectly affect innovation in associated technologies through a ‘demand-pull’ dynamic. Other policies, such as public research and development (R&D) funding, directly incentivize innovation through ‘technology-push’ means. In this letter, we examine these effects on innovation in the United States wind energy industry. We estimate a set of econometric models relating a set of US federal and state policies to patenting activity in wind technologies over the period 1974‐2009. We find that RPS policies have had significant positive effects on wind innovation, whereas tax-based incentives have not been particularly effective. We also find evidence that the effects of RPS incentives differ between states. Finally, we find that public R&D funding can be a significant driver of wind innovation, though its effect in the US has been modest.

Scaling Moore’s Wall: A Public-Private Partnership in Search of a Technological Revolution

The decline of corporate research and vertical disintegration of supply chains in many industries has led to an innovation ecosystem increasingly reliant on linkages between institutions. These shifts present new challenges for long-term technology development. Pre-commercial public-private research consortia offer one policy response, and yet the majority of past research has focused on public-private consortia created for short-term (1- to 3-years out) technology development and technology catch-up. Based on unprecedented access to archives of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), publically available data, 50 semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, we examine how one public-private partnership, the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), emerged in response to arguably the most significant presumptive anomaly of our time: the end of Moore’s Law. NRI aimed to bridge the semiconductor industry’s past 40 years of unprecedented technology development — captured by Moore’s Law — with a radically new (and, as of this writing, not-yet-discovered) technology that will maintain this development indefinitely. We describe and analyze the processes by which NRI emerged. Building on a long history of collaborative university-industry research programs managed by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), we suggest the NRI played a coordinating role within the scientific community. Specifically, we show how NRI incorporated industry expertise in manufacturing and design to inform and shape academic research aimed at inventing a successor to CMOS technology. We conclude by questioning the extent to which the effort was appropriately suited to the nature and importance of the end-of-Moore’s Law challenge and the extent to which lessons from NRI may be generalized to a broader set of industrial contexts requiring coordination to overcome major technological discontinuities. Given that the NRI program was ongoing as of the terminal date of our study, we make no normative judgment about NRI’s success or failure in meeting its objectives.

Spinning Tales About Japanese Cotton Spinning: Saxonhouse (1974) Then and Now

This essay provides a perspective on the intellectual context of the late Gary Saxonhouse’s first scholarly publication, which appeared in the Journal of Economic History in 1974, a study of the Japanese cotton spinning industry in the Meiji Period. For the remainder of Saxonhouse’s illustrious career, “A Tale” served as scaffolding on which he built subsequent analyses and perspectives on Japan’s early industrialization. Understanding Saxonhouse’s intellectual inheritance enriches our understanding of this pioneering study and the making of an economic historian and, more broadly, a “Japan specialist” in the study of economic growth. The year 2014 marks the 40 anniversary of the publication of the late Gary R. Saxonhouse’s article, “A Tale of Japanese Technological Diffusion in the Meiji Period,” in that year’s first issue of The Journal of Economic History (hereafter “A Tale” and JEH). “A Tale” was not only Saxonhouse’s first article in the JEH but was also his first journal article in what became an illustrious career cut all-to-short in 2006. Yet as Saxonhouse noted early in “A Tale,” he had two other publications in the works: a chapter, “Country Girls and the Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry,” forthcoming in his mentor Hugh Patrick’s edited volume, Japanese Industrialization and Its Social Consequences, and a third paper, in mimeo, “Productivity Change and Labor Absorption in Japanese Cotton Spinning, 1891-1935,” that would appear in The Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1975. Saxonhouse would not publish another article in the JEH until his and Gavin Wright’s “National Leadership and Competing Technological 48 Gary R. Saxonhouse, “A Tale of Japanese Technological Diffusion in the Meiji Period,” Journal of Economic History 34 (1974): 149-165. 49 We are most grateful to Arlene Saxonhouse and Hugh Patrick for providing us with biographical and other information on Gary Saxonhouse’s development as a Japan specialist. 50 Saxonhouse, “A Tale.” Saxonhouse’s second publication, “Economics of Postwar Fertility in Japan: Differentials and Trends: Comment,” Journal of Political Economy, would also appear in 1974 but in the second issue, whereas “Tale of Diffusion” appeared in JEH’s first issue of the year. The JPE piece was a four-page commentary on Masanori Hashimoto, “Economics of Postwar Fertility in Japan: Differentials and Trends.” 82, 2 (1974): S170-S194. Saxonhouse died of leukemia at the age of sixty-three November 30, 2006. A short biographical sketch of Saxonhouse can be found at http://um2017.org/faculty- history/faculty/gary-saxonhouse/memoir. 51 Saxonhouse, “A Tale,” fn. 4, p.150. In fact, Patrick’s edited volume did not appear until 1976, and the title of Saxonhouse’s contribution had changed to “Country Girls and Communication among Competitors in the Japanese Cotton-Spinning Industry.” By this time his “mimeo” (a.k.a., a “working paper” that he circulated in mimeograph form) had already appeared in The Quarterly Journal of Economics—“Capital Accumulation, Labor Saving, and Labor Absorption Once More, Once More,” 89, 2 (1975): 322-330.