Technological Discontinuities and Dominant Designs: A Cyclical Model of Technological Change

The authors thank Eric Abrahamson, Warren Boeker, Donald Hambrick, and three anonymous reviewers for their assistance. An evolutionary model of technological change is proposed in which a technological breakthrough, or discontinuity, initiates an era of intense technical variation and selection, culminating in a single dominant design. This era of ferment is followed by a period of incremental technical progress, which may be broken by a...