Technological Innovation, Disruption & AI Management

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key definitions, concepts, and frameworks in technological innovation management, technology trajectories, standards battles, timing of entry, disruptive innovation, and artificial intelligence.

Technological Innovation

The act of introducing a new device, method, or material for commercial or practical objectives.

CAD/CAM Systems

Computer-aided design and manufacturing systems that enable rapid product design, shorter production runs, and faster development, contributing to shorter product life cycles.

Innovation Funnel

A framework illustrating that while many ideas enter the development pipeline, only a few turn into feasible projects, and even fewer become successful commercial products.

Creativity

The ability to produce work that is both useful and novel.

Divergent Thinking

The ability to combine ideas that are not normally connected by demonstrating openness to remote associations.

Openness to Experience

The personality trait most strongly associated with individual creativity, characterized by active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity, intellectual curiosity, and willingness to try unusual ideas.

Intrinsic Motivation

Internal drive to work on something because it is personally interesting or meaningful, which is particularly important for fostering creativity.

Extrinsic Motivation

Motivation driven by external rewards such as money, which can sometimes undermine creative thinking.

User Innovators

Individual users who innovate to solve their own unmet practical needs rather than primarily to profit from manufacturing and selling a product.

Basic Research

Research conducted to increase understanding of a topic, without specific immediate commercial applications intended.

Applied Research

Research conducted to increase understanding of a topic with the specific goal of meeting a practical, defined need.

Development

The practical application of knowledge to produce useful devices, materials, or processes.

Science Push

A linear model of innovation assuming technological progress moves sequentially from scientific discovery to invention, manufacturing, and marketing.

Demand Pull

A model of innovation that originates from unmet customer needs, which drive invention, manufacturing, and commercialization.

Complementor

A firm that produces goods or services that enhance the value or utility of another firm's primary product.

Absorptive Capacity

An organization's ability to recognize, assimilate, and utilize new external knowledge.

Bayh-Dole Act of 1980

U.S. legislation that allows universities to retain rights and collect royalties on inventions developed through taxpayer-funded research.

Technology Cluster

A regional network of interconnected firms, suppliers, and institutions centered around a common technology area, such as Silicon Valley.

Tacit Knowledge

Knowledge that is complex and difficult to formalize, document, or transfer through written instructions.

Agglomeration Economies

The economic benefits firms gain by locating near one another, including shared knowledge spillovers, specialized labor pools, and robust supplier networks.

Technological Spillover

The unplanned spread of benefits from R&D efforts of one organization to other firms in the industry or region.

Knowledge Broker

An individual or organization that transfers information and expertise from one domain or industry into another where it can be applied innovatively.

Technology Trajectory

The evolutionary path a technology follows over time in terms of its performance improvements and market diffusion.

Product Innovation

Innovations embodied in the outputs of an organization, such as new goods or services.

Process Innovation

Innovations in the way an organization conducts its operations, including production, marketing, and logistics techniques.

Radical Innovation

An innovation that is significantly new and markedly different from existing products or established practices.

Incremental Innovation

An innovation making minor adjustments, adaptations, or incremental enhancements to existing technologies or practices.

Competence-Enhancing Innovation

An innovation that leverages and builds upon a firm's pre-existing knowledge base and organizational capabilities.

Competence-Destroying Innovation

An innovation that renders an established firm's existing technical capabilities and knowledge base obsolete.

Component Innovation

An innovation that modifies one or more subcomponents of a product without altering the overall architectural design of the system.

Architectural Innovation

An innovation that alters the overall structural design of a system or the way individual components interact with each other.

Discontinuous Technology

A new technology that satisfies a market need by utilizing a completely novel technological knowledge base.

Rogers' Adopter Categories

A classification of adopters based on innovativeness: Innovators ($2.5\%$), Early Adopters ($13.5\%$), Early Majority ($34\%$), Late Majority ($34\%$), and Laggards ($16\%$).

Dominant Design

A single architecture or product configuration that establishes market dominance and is adopted by the majority of producers.

Fluid Phase

The early period of a technology cycle characterized by high technological uncertainty, crude product designs, and intense experimentation.

Specific Phase

The stage in a technology cycle following the emergence of a dominant design, where firms shift focus to incremental product improvements and manufacturing efficiency.

Era of Ferment

The phase following a technological discontinuity characterized by competition among distinct design architectures until a dominant design emerges.

Creative Destruction

Schumpeter's term for the process by which continuous technological discontinuities replace established firms and industries with new innovations.

Learning Effects

Reductions in operational costs and improvements in performance achieved as cumulative production volume increases.

Network Externalities

A dynamic where the value a user derives from a product increases as the total number of users (installed base) grows.

Winner-Take-All Markets

Markets characterized by powerful network externalities and increasing returns, where a single dominant technological platform captures almost all market share.

Path Dependency

The concept that historical decisions and early events determine long-term technological trajectories and outcomes.

Stand-Alone Value

The intrinsic utility offered by a technology based purely on its features, usability, and functional qualities independent of network size.

Vaporware

Products pre-announced or heavily marketed long before availability to create a perception of momentum and an established installed base.

Platform Ecosystem

A market environment organized around a central core technology that connects third-party complementors with end users.

First Mover

The first firm to introduce a new category of product or service into the market.

Incumbent Inertia

The tendency of established market leaders to react slowly to technological shifts or changing market conditions due to existing commitments.

Disruptive Innovation

Innovations that originate in low-end or new-market footholds with simpler, cheaper alternatives and eventually improve enough to displace incumbents.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Computer systems designed to emulate human cognitive functions, process large data streams, recognize patterns, and make automated decisions.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

An AI subfield focusing on enabling computer software to analyze, understand, and generate human voice and textual language.

Computer Vision

An AI subfield dedicated to processing, extracting visual features from, and interpreting real-world images and environments.

Machine Learning

A domain of artificial intelligence where algorithms identify patterns in empirical data to improve decision performance without explicit rules programming.

Deep Learning

A subset of machine learning utilizing complex multi-layered neural networks to extract high-level patterns from large datasets.

Generative AI

AI models leveraging neural networks and deep learning to synthesize novel content across text, code, image, video, and audio modalities.

AI Hallucination

An instance where an artificial intelligence model generates inaccurate, misleading, or unfounded output presented as factual fact.

Kodak vs. Sony Strategic Case Dimensions

A strategic comparison contrasting Kodak's failure due to operating/retail model mismatches during digital disruption against Sony's standard victory in the Blu-ray format war driven by console integration.