Toward a socially embedded view of disruptive technology emergence

Abstract

While prior literature emphasizes that technological discontinuities influence firms’ collaboration activities, it remains unclear how technology collaboration networks emerge and evolve. Drawing on models of different stages of technological change, we examine how firms’ rules of attachment evolve along technological discontinuities. Specifically, we theorize on the social embeddedness of technology emergence by focusing on the transferability of status mechanisms and tie closure across established and disruptive technology networks. The evolution of monoclonal antibodies in the cancer treatment provides a unique research context to test our theorized model. Results are based on a social network analysis spanning 20 years and 523 firms and emphasize that alliance formation dynamics in emerging disruptive technology collaboration networks are driven by status transfers from the established technology network. However, as the disruptive technology matures, status signals from the disruptive technology network start to become relevant to tie formation in both networks. In addition, our findings indicate that dual network triadic closure bridges the boundaries between the established and disruptive technology networks.