Social and Structural Barriers to the IT Revolution in High-Tech Industries

Abstract:     
Organizational discontinuity appears to be an important contributor to venture success in rapidly changing technological environments. Most Silicon Valley ventures are assemblies of human, technological, and financial resources and supplier/client relationships with disparate organizational heritage. Such ventures are not traceable as an extension of any single existing organization and thus constitute discontinuity from how production used to be organized. We analyze ways in which organizational discontinuity, under conditions of high technological uncertainty, contributes to new ventures' competitive advantage and expose difficulties inherent to simulating venturing within an existing industrial organization. We use a comparative framework to expose the relative abundance of organizational discontinuity in the U.S. high technology sector and identify institutional barriers that stifle it in its Japanese counterpart.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 29

Keywords: entrepreneurship, ventures, innovation, Silicon Valley, Japan

JEL Classification: M13, O32, L14

Accepted Paper Series