Kristina Dahlin

Diffusion and Industrial Dynamics in the Robot Industry

The robot industry was founded by American firms in the early 1960s; ten years later the installed robots world-wide numbered close to 5,000 units. In 1989 the world market had grown to 80,000 units annually, the total installed stock being round 320,000 units (IFR 1990). During these years the initiative moved from the American scene to Japan. Today the Japanese market is the largest, constituting 70 per cent of the world market, and Japanese companies dominate the global robot industry. Nevertheless, a number of primarily European firms have grown to become quite successful. The most prominent of these is the Swedish firm ABB Robotics, now a market leader in the robot industry.

Multimarket Contact, Strategic Alliances, and Firm Performance

Research on multimarket contact and firm performance has produced mixed results. To reconcile this discrepancy, we theorize how varying levels of multimarket contact may generate mutual forbearance that influences firm performance. We also examine how strategic alliances moderate the relationship between levels of multimarket contact and firm performance. Our analysis of 233 semiconductor firms across 52 markets reveals that multimarket contact has an inverted U-shaped relationship with a multimarket firm’s market share. The number of strategic alliances that a firm has helps to further extend the positive effect of multimarket contact and mitigate its negative effect on the firm’s market share. Accordingly, our study contributes to the literature on multimarket competition by shedding light on the conditions under which multimarket contact may increase/decrease firm performance.

With whom do technology sponsors partner during technology battles? social networking strategies for unproven (and proven) technologies

The academic literature on technology battles has grown rapidly since the 1970s, tracking the ever-expanding role of information and communication technologies in our daily lives. An intriguing thread in this literature pertains to the influence of social networks on standards setting processes. While scholars acknowledge networks’ importance, their relevance to sponsors’ efforts to diffuse their technologies and establish them as de facto standards have been neglected. We theorize that sponsors choose alliance partners according to their location in the networks that connect potential adopters and that the network position that enhances a partner’s attractiveness depends on a technology’s stage of development. We hypothesize that sponsors of technologies that are early in their development and unproven commercially choose partners to create multiple points of contact between previous and potential adopters, called wide bridges. These redundant ties can foster the broad acceptance of a new technology that is essential to drive its diffusion. Sponsors of technologies in later stages of their development, with a commercial track record, can rely on a sparser network of ties to activate peer-to-peer diffusion. In line with our predictions, we found that during the battle to establish a 2G wireless standard in the U.S. market, Qualcomm, sponsor of the unproven CDMA (code division multiple access) technology, formed alliances that conformed to a wide-bridge pattern, while Ericsson, sponsor of the proven TDMA (time division multiple access) technology, formed alliances consistent with a peer-to-peer pattern of diffusion.

Merit, acceptance or access: Opposing forces to adoption of a new standard

When faced with a new standard, a firm is influenced by various factors. Some forces motivate adoption of the standard, while other factors have a constraining effect. How do firms evaluate these opposing forces? We examine this question using data from the US cellular telephones industry and suggest that not only do firms evaluate the technical merit and likelihood of market acceptance of the standard but also evaluate factors associated with the players developing the standard. We explore how firms choose a new resource when the potential value of that resource is not yet established, a resource whose value is influenced both by its owners and its users. We find that technical merit, and new patentees have a positive effect on its adoption but concentration of ownership has a negative effect on adoption.