New Directions in Research on Dominant Designs, Technoloigcal Innovations and Industrial Change

The essay proposes that technological evolution proceeds in the form of a nested hierarchy of technology cycles. We argue that a hierarchical model of technical evolution gains tremendous analytical power when linkages between subsystems are viewed as subsystems in their own right. The model clarifies why innovations leading to order-of-magnitude changes in performance can originate at any level of the physical hierarchy, and helps remove the confusions in the existing literature.