Thread:Lasente/@comment-5968415-20130108185058

This chapter is about different dimensions that are often used to categorize technologies. I learned that those dimensions are useful for understanding some key ways that one innovation may differ from another and I think this is very important. In the beginning of the chapter, I learned about the term " technology trajectory", the path a technology follows through time. It was very interesting and I think it is indispensable in order to follow the performance of a technology and then make some adjustments if necessary.

I learned that technological innovations are often categorized into different types such as radical and incremental. Radical innovation is when the innovation is very new and different from prior solutions. Incremental innovation is an innovation that makes a relatively minor change from existing practices. Something very important that I learned is that different types of innovations and technologies influence the industry's competitors and customers in different ways. The impacts won't be the same with all the different types of innovations. Four dimensions are most commonly used: Product versus process innovation, radical versus incremental, competence enhancing versus competence destroying, and architectural versus component. The dimension that made the more sense for me was the first one, product and process innovation. Product innovation is about the output of the organization, what goods or services have been innovated. Process innovation is about the way an organization conducts is business, such as new techniques of producing or any marketing. The last two dimensions were a little bit more confused for me

The graph of technology performance over cumulative effort invested often exhibits an s-shape curve and this made a lot of sense for me. It is logical because performance improvement in a new technology is initially difficult and costly, but once the technology is well-understood, the performance begins to accelerate amnd when the technology is getting old and not good enough anymore, the performance starts to decrease. The graph of a technology's market adoption over time has the same explanation and it exhibits a s-shape curve as well. I learned that the rate at which a technology impoves over time is often faster than the rate at which customer requirements increase over time. This chapter was overall very interesting and I learned a lot of different things but the most important thing to remember is that one innovation may differ from another. 