Technological lockout: An integrative model of the economic and strategic factors driving technology success and failure

Technology markets often exhibit extreme path dependency, enabling random or idiosyncratic events to have dramatic effects on technology success or failure. However, these effects accrue in an ordered way: by impacting a set of factors that have predictable influences on technology adoption. Since firm strategy also impacts these factors, technology adoption is neither wholly random nor beyond the firm's control. In this article I build a model of these factors by integrating economics, strategy, and marketing research. The model yields important implications for the strategic development and deployment of technology.