Technological Pre-Adaptation, Speciation, and Emergence of New Technologies: How Corning Invented and Developed Fiber Optics

Abstract

This article investigates how established firms innovate and even initiate new technological trajectories. We build on and expand the notion of technological speciation to describe how a new technology emerges when a firm leverages its technological knowledge into a new application domain. Current research on technological speciation does not investigate how firms accumulate the technological knowledge which they eventually redeploy into different domains. Nor does it clarify the precise role of luck (historical accidents) and foresight (strategy) in shaping the overall process. This requires a finer grained investigation of the microprocesses and evolutionary forces underlying the dynamics of technological speciation. To this end, we use a longitudinal case study of Corning's invention and development of fiber optics technology. We focus less on testing theory and more on describing a phenomenon to generate new theoretical insight.