Abstract
Successful innovation and diffusion of technology can be attributed to the identification of the orbit of emerging new technologies that complement or substitute for existing technologies. This dynamism resembles the co-evolution process in an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, in order to maintain sustainable development, the complex interplay between competition and cooperation, typically observed in predator–prey systems, create a sophisticated balance. Given that an ecosystem can be used as a masterpiece system, this sophisticated balance can provide suggestive ideas for identifying an optimal orbit of competitive innovations with complement or substitution dynamism.
Prompted by such a sophisticated balance in an ecosystem, this paper analyzes the optimal orbit of competitive innovations, and on the basis of an application of Lotka–Volterra equations, it reviews substitution orbits of Japan's monochrome to color TV system, fixed telephones to cellular telephones, cellular telephones to mobile internet access service, and analog to digital TV broadcasting. On the basis of substitution orbits analyses, it attempts to extract suggestions supportive to identifying an optimal policy option in a complex orbit leading to expected orbit.
Key findings include policy options that are effective in controlling parameters for Lotka–Volterra equations leading to expected orbit.
Reprinted from Technological Forecasting and Social Change 71, No. 4, C. Watanabe, R. Kondo, N. Ouchi and H. Wei, A Substitution Orbit Model of Competitive Innovations, pages: 365–390, copyright (2004), with permission from Elsevier.
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Notes
- 1.
Moore refers Gergory Rateson's definition of co-evolution that as a process in which interdependent species evolve in an endless reciprocal cycle – in which “changes in species A set the stage for the natural selection of changes in species B” – and vice versa.
- 2.
See flexible substitution models and the distinction between internal and external influence [29].
- 3.
See the mathematical details and qualitative analysis of nonlinear systems by Lotka–Volterra approach [24].
- 4.
This implies the state of equilibrium with respect to y substitution for x, and does not imply the termination of y or x increase.
- 5.$$\begin{array}{rcl} \frac{{\rm d}\dot{V}(x,\,y)}{{\rm d}t} & = & -2\left\{{ex(a-bx-cy)^2+cy(d-ex-fy)^2}\right\} \leq 0 \\ \frac{{\rm d}\dot{V}(x,\,y)}{{\rm d}t} & = & 0 \ {\rm when} \ \dot{V}(x,\,y)=\dot{V}(\bar{x},\,\bar{y}). \end{array}$$
By differentiating \(\dot{V}(x, y)\) in (4.7) by time t we obtain This suggests that an orbit \(\dot{V}(x,\,y)\) shifts toward the equilibrium point \(\dot{V}(\bar{x},\,\bar{y})\) with a pace of \(g(\equiv-2\left\{{ex(a-bx-cy)^2+cy(d-ex-fy)^2}\right\})\). Given a constant \(g, \ \dot{V}(x,y)\) can be depicted as \(\dot{V}(x,y)=\dot{V}_0(x,y)e^{gt}\) where \(\dot{V}_0(x,y)\) indicates initial change.
- 6.
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Watanabe, C. (2009). A Substitution Orbit Model of Competitive Innovations. In: Managing Innovation in Japan. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89272-4_4
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