represented by Utterback

From Foster to Christensen, technology was the central driver of innovation and its dominant view was two overlapping S-curves (cf. Figure 1). The new tech- nology S-curve started below the old technology S-curve, but would soon catch up and reach superior performances, whatever the attempts of the old-technology champions, as represented by Utterback (1994).

From this result, it seemed rather natural to conclude that technological inno- vation was the source of competitive advantage, and therefore of the market domination. The earlier the new technology is introduced, the faster it can ride the S-curve and overtake the incumbent technology: Hence the case for moving first.

The reality of the first-mover advantage certainly depends on the industry characteristics and, in particular, on the technology itself. For instance, because industries characterized by a strong network externalities (Katz and Shapiro, 1985) also show path dependencies, timing of entry clearly can be important (Schilling, 2002). The early entry of Microsoft in the programming languages market (Basic) in the 70s and then in operating systems market (MS-DOS) in the 80s enabled the firm to maintain industry domination to this day, although it should be noted that

Source: Utterback (1994)

Fig. 1. Established product versus invading product performance.

362 B. Buisson & P. Silberzahn

Microsoft was a first mover in neither field (Wallace and Erickson, 1992). The argument is made that first movers are able to set standards, or at least to influence standard creation to their advantage, by taking advantage of their so-called ‘installed base’. However, research in this field shows that this is not necessarily the case as the standardization process is more complex (Chiesa et al., 2002; Sahay and Riley, 2003). Worse, the loser of the standardization race loses the first- mover advantage and may have to spend a lot of resources to bridge the tech- nological gap with the winner (Chiesa et al., 2002).