Thinking about technology: understanding the role of cognition and technical change Sarah Kaplan and Mary Tripsas MIT-IPC-03-007 December 2003 Thinking about technology: understanding the role of cognition and technical change Sarah Kaplan and Mary Tripsas MIT IPC Working Paper IPC-03-007 December 2003 Scholars of technical change have long been interested in understanding the ways in which new technologies shape and are shaped by firms and industries. Much attention has been focused on the three fundamental questions in the field – How do technologies evolve? How do producers respond to technical change? How do users adopt and adapt to new technologies? The phenomena represented by these questions are complex, in large part because of the high degree of uncertainty inherent in periods of technical change. It seems likely in these situations that the actors’ cognitive frames of the technology and environment should play a critical role in determining outcomes. Yet, despite an increasing interest in cognition in management research, cognitive perspectives have made only small inroads into an understanding of these questions individually and as they relate to each other. In this paper, we develop a model of producers and users as interpretive systems that interact to shape the evolution of technology. We then illustrate this model using a case study of the evolution of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). The views expressed herein are the author’s responsibility and do not necessarily reflect those of the MIT Industrial Performance Center or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thinking about technology: understanding the role of cognition and technical change Sarah Kaplan MIT Sloan School of Management 50 Memorial Dr., Room E52-511 Cambridge, MA 02142 617-253-4023
[email protected] Mary Tripsas Harvard Business School 219 South Hall Soldiers Field Road Boston, MA 02163 (617) 495-8407
[email protected] Working paper, December 2003 Authors are listed alphabetically and are equal contributors.