Competition is intense among rival technologies and success depends on predicting their future trajectory of performance. To resolve this challenge, managers often follow popular heuristics, generalizations, or “laws” like the Moore’s Law. We propose a model, Step And Wait (SAW), for predicting the path of technological innovation and compare its performance against eight models for 25 technologies and 804 technologies-years across six markets. The estimates of the model provide four important results. First, Moore’s Law and Kryder’s law do not generalize across markets; none holds for all technologies even in a single market. Second, SAW produces superior predictions over traditional methods, such as the Bass model or Gompertz law, and can form predictions for a completely new technology, by incorporating information from other categories on time varying covariates. Third, analysis of the model parameters suggests that: i) recent technologies improve at a faster rate than old technologies; ii) as the number of competitors increases, performance improves in smaller steps and longer waits; iii) later entrants and technologies that have a number of prior steps tend to have smaller steps and shorter waits; but iv) technologies with long average wait time continue to have large steps. Fourth, technologies cluster in their performance by market.
Stop and Wait from the research paper
Stop and Wait improvement graphs
Step and Wait (SAW) based on 26 technologies in six markets from lighting to automobile batteries. With possibly mislabelled last column. Not percent per year/
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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