دانلود رایگان مقاله انتشار نوآوری و تکنولوژی در زنجیره تامین رقابتی

Abstract

Innovations in consumer products frequently rely on technological advances across multiple tiers in a supply chain. Considering the consumer market demand and downstream investment conditions as input, we model a game in a two-tier supply chain where downstream firms choose to adopt different levels of an upstream technology and an upstream technology leader determines its pricing policy. We identify two necessary but distinct elements for the successful development, adoption, and diffusion of upstream technologies that are sold to lower tiers as components within final products. (1) The level of technology demanded by the market: We develop a measure, Technological Potential, which describes the highest level of an upstream technology demanded by consumer markets. (2) A sufficiently rich return to an upstream innovator, as a function of different levels of technology. From these two elements, we show that the relative magnitudes of two competing sets of consumer market factors determine the Technological Potential whereas the overall magnitude of the factors in both sets determines the return to the upstream developer. We discuss how this difference in consumer market factors’ influence on these two elements may determine how different technologies fare in the supply chain. Our results have managerial implications for: investors in research and development project selection in identifying profitable technologies that are also demanded at higher capability levels; and for governments in defining more targeted public policies - for example in choosing the right tier of a supply chain to provide subsidies - to encourage market support for certain technologies.

7. Concluding Remarks

In this paper we study the effects of consumer market factors on upstream technologies, which are themselves implied by the current and potential use of an upstream technology dimension in various consumer products. We demonstrated that these factors can be used to classify different technology dimensions and that they influence the two necessary elements for their success, the technology level demanded (Technology Potential, TP) and the return to the upstream leader who develops them, differently. This difference is then is used to explain multiple ways an upstream technology may fare (or be held up) in the supply chain. Depending on which element is weaker, we suggest public subsidies to be targeted toward different tiers of the supply chain. An important managerial implication of our results is that TP and the accompanying return function can be used by upstream firms in their R&D project selection. They can choose technology dimensions with sufficiently steep return curves and in those technology dimensions target improvement levels which do not exceed the TP of the consumer markets. Collecting enough data to quantify TP may require more detailed models empirically to find the market parameter values. At the level of abstraction used in this paper, our results might be used in an ordinal way. However, future research to quantify TP (and R(M1 )) or a proxy for it may lead to practical tools to support project selection for research-focused firms or venture capitalists seeking viable investment opportunities.