The Coevolution of Technical and Institutional Events in the Development of an Innovation

Abstract

Abstract How and why are technological innovations developed and commercialized? Answers to these how and why questions have significant practical implications for public policymakers, entrepreneurs, investors, and managers engaged in the highly uncertain and novel development of innovations. The how question requires a process description of the temporal sequence of events that occur to create and transform basic scientific knowledge into commercially viable products or services. Based on an intensive longitudinal field study, this chapter provides such a process description by narrating the events that were observed to occur over a 35-year period to develop and commercialize the cochlear implant, a new-to-the-world biomedical technology that provides hearing to profoundly deaf people. The why question calls for a theory of change that explains this observed process. This chapter examines the utility of a social evolutionary theory of change for explaining the development and commercialization of cochlear implants. A growing interest in biological analogies of evolution throughout the social sciences (Hannan and Freeman, 1989) led a growing number of scholars in the 1980s and 1990s to explain the dynamics that govern technical and institutional change as a social evolutionary process of variation, selection, and retention. Variation is the creation of a novel technical or institutional form within a population under investigation. Selection occurs principally through competition among the alternative novel forms that exist, and actors in the environment select those forms which optimize or are best suited to the resource base of an environmental niche (Hannan and Freeman, 1977:939). Retention involves the forces (including inertia and persistence) that perpetuate and maintain certain technical and institutional forms that were selected in the past (Aldrich, 1979).