The goal of this annotated bibliography on technology and innovation is to organize and present the most important literature relevant to a scholar seeking to understand and advance the field. It includes articles that are highly-cited and foundational pieces, as well as recent articles that help give the reader a sense of where the field is headed and where likely opportunities for future research lie. This article seeks to strike an equilibrium among the variety of perspectives that exist in technology and innovation literature, balancing new and old research as well as economic, organizational, and cross-disciplinary methodologies. The innovative process is broadly considered here, as well as the technologies that result from it, including business model innovation, service-level innovation, and product innovation, highlighting articles that utilize diverse levels of analysis.

We examine the effect of prizes on innovation using data on awards for technological development offered by the Royal Agricultural Society of England at annual competitions between 1839 and 1939. We find that the effects of prizes on competitive entry are large, and we also detect an impact of the prizes on the quality of contemporaneous patents, especially when prize categories were set by a strict rotation scheme, thereby mitigating the potentially confounding effect that they targeted only "hot" technology sectors. Prizes encouraged competition and medals were more important than monetary awards. The boost to innovation we observe cannot be explained by the redirection of existing inventive activity.

This study looks at the role of firms' internal linkages in highly competitive technology clusters, where much of the world's R&D takes place. The leading players in these clusters are multilocation firms that organize and integrate knowledge across sites worldwide. Strong internal links across locations allow these firms to leverage knowledge for competitive advantage without risking critical knowledge outflow to competitors. We examine whether multi-location firms increase internal ties when they face appropriability risks from direct competitors. Our empirical analysis of the global semiconductor industry shows that when leading firms co-locate with direct market competitors, innovations tend to be quickly internalized and are more likely to involve collaboration across locations, particularly with inventors from the firm's primary R&D site. Our results suggest that R&D dynamics in clusters are heavily influenced by multi-location firms with innovative links across locations and that future research on technology innovation in clusters should account for these links.

This working paper surveys the business history of the global wind energy turbine industry between the late nineteenth century and the present day. It examines the long-term prominence of firms headquartered in Denmark, the more fluctuating role of U.S.-based firms, and the more recent growth of German, Spanish, Indian, and Chinese firms. While natural resource endowment in wind has not been very significant in explaining the country of origin of leading firms, the existence of rural areas not supplied by grid electricity was an important motivation for early movers in both the U.S. and Denmark. Public policy was the problem rather than the opportunity for wind entrepreneurs before 1980, but beginning with feed-in tariffs and other policy measures taken in California, policy mattered a great deal. However, Danish firms, building on inherited technological capabilities and benefitting from a small-scale and decentralized industrial structure, benefitted more from Californian public policies. The more recent growth of German, Spanish, and Chinese firms reflected both home country subsidies for wind energy and strong local content policies, while successful firms pursued successful strategies to acquire technologies and develop their own capabilities.

Technological advancement and innovation requires the integration of both external knowledge and internal inventiveness. In this paper, we unpack the concept of absorptive capacity and separately explore the effect of different types of prior experience on the capacity to adopt external knowledge and make internal inventions. We also measure how absorptive capacity is influenced by changes in design "paths." We investigate nine open source programming contests in which 875 software programmers submit over 4.7 million lines of code. We conduct our analysis at the individual level and identify how programmers gain the ability to adopt and invent valuable code. Our evidence both confirms the theory of absorptive capacity and suggests refinements to it. We find that prior experience with both adoption and invention can indeed improve the capacity to adopt and invent valuable code, but we find that experience with adoption has the largest effect on invention capacity. We also find that major changes in the design "path" both advance and impede absorptive capacity. Changes in path allow rapid experience with alternative ideas, and this eventually aids adoption and invention capacity. However, these changes temporarily harm the ability of programmers to create valuable inventions. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on absorptive capacity and open and distributed innovation.

Explanations of Japanese technological modernization from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century have increasingly focused on domestic capabilities as opposed to the traditional emphasis on knowledge transfers from the West. Yet, the literature is mostly qualitative and it lacks a comparative context. This article presents quantitative metrics derived from patent data covering Japan, the United States, Britain and Germany and it also exploits non-patent based sources. The evidence shows that Japanese domestic inventive activity exhibited a pattern of rapid modernization to the technology frontier in terms of its level, sectoral distribution and quality. Domestic capabilities were much stronger than is often supposed in accounts that stress the prevalence of Western technology diffusion. A long run expansion in indigenous development set a favorable foundation for the economic growth miracle Japan experienced after the Second World War.

We address a longstanding question about the causes of creative destruction. Dominant incumbent firms, long successful in an existing technology, are often much less successful in new technological eras. This is puzzling, since a cursory analysis would suggest that incumbent firms have the potential to take advantage of economies of scope across new and old lines of business and, if economies of scope are unavailable, to simply reproduce entrant behavior by creating a "firm within a firm." There are two broad streams of explanation for incumbent failure in these circumstances. One posits that incumbents fear cannibalization in the marketplace, and so under-invest in the new technology. The second suggests that incumbent firms develop organizational capabilities and cognitive frames that make them slow to "see" new opportunities and that make it difficult to respond effectively once the new opportunity is identified. In this paper we draw on two of the most important historical episodes in the history of the computing industry, the introduction of the PC and of the browser, to develop a third hypothesis. Both IBM and Microsoft, having been extremely successful in an old technology, came to have grave difficulties competing in the new, despite some dramatic early success. We suggest that these difficulties do not arise from cannibalization concerns or from inherited cognitive frames. Instead they reflect diseconomies of scope rooted in assets that are necessarily shared across both businesses. We show that both Microsoft and IBM were initially very successful in creating freestanding business units that could compete with entrants on their own terms, but that as the new businesses grew, the need to share key firm-level assets imposed significant costs on both businesses and created severe organizational conflict. In IBM and Microsoft's case this conflict eventually led to control over the new business being given to the old and that in both cases effectively crippled the new business.

We develop a model that, at the aggregate level, is similar to the one sector neoclassical growth model, while, at the disaggregate level, has implications for the path of observable measures of technology adoption. We estimate our model using data on the diffusion of 15 technologies in 166 countries over the last two centuries. We evaluate the implications of our estimates for aggregate TFP and per capita income. Our results reveal that, on average, countries have adopted technologies 47 years after their invention. There is substantial variation across technologies and countries. Over the past two centuries, newer technologies have been adopted faster than old ones. The cross-country variation in the adoption of technologies accounts for at least a quarter of per capita income differences.

This presentation is based on our research program over the last seven years in which our objective has been to rigorously distinguish leader and leadership and to create a technology for providing access to being a leader and exercising leadership effectively (in short, a technology for reliably creating leaders). Our research program involves not only discovering the technology, but also to create a course that would be available to others to use, experiment with, research, improve on and innovate from. Our efforts thus required an experimental laboratory to discover what will enable us as educators and trainers to efficiently and effectively create leaders. Dean Mark Zupan of the U. of Rochester Simon School Of Business provided us with a research/teaching laboratory during the five years (2004–2008) we worked there with students, alumni, executives, and faculty from various academic institutions. This laboratory allowed us to investigate leader and leadership as phenomena, and to create technologies for providing actionable access to leader and leadership. The course is now also taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy, was delivered in 2009 at the Erasmus Academie (Rotterdam), and a version of which is taught at the Erasmus University Law School. In June 2010 the course was taught at the Mays School of Business, Texas A&M University. The course is designed to leave participants being leaders and exercising leadership effectively as their natural self expression, and to contribute to creating a new science of leadership. We have two or three more years of development left to do and eventually we will produce the product as papers and perhaps a book. The technology and the course is founded on what we term an ontological model of human nature. The ontological approach is uniquely effective in providing actionable access to being a leader and exercising leadership effectively. While ontology as a general subject is concerned with the being of anything, here we are concerned with the ontology of human beings (the nature and function of being for human beings). Specifically we are concerned with the ontology of leader and leadership (the nature and function of being for a leader and the actions of effective leadership). Who one is being when being a leader shapes one's perceptions, emotions, creative imagination, thinking, planning, and consequently one's actions in the exercise of leadership. Being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one's natural self-expression does not come from learning and trying to emulate the characteristics or styles of noteworthy leaders, or learning what effective leaders do and trying to emulate them (and most certainly not from merely being in a leadership position, or position of authority). If you are not being a leader, and you try to act like a leader, you are likely to fail. That's called being inauthentic (playing a role or pretending to be a leader), deadly in any attempt to exercise leadership. An epistemological mastery of a subject leaves you knowing. An ontological mastery of a subject leaves you being. Gaining access to being a leader and the effective exercise of leadership as one's natural self-expression also requires dealing with those factors present in all human beings that constrain each person's freedom to be—and constrain and shape one's perceptions, emotions, creative imagination, thinking, planning, and actions. When one is not constrained or shaped by these factors—what we term "ontological constraints"—one's way of being and acting results naturally in one's personal best. We work with the students so that they accomplish this for themselves.