Standing on the Shoulders of the Others: How Organizations Can Shape Trajectories of Emerging GPTs

The evolution of emerging General-Purpose Technologies (GPTs) is affected by high uncertainty related to the most promising knowledge recombination and application areas. Indeed, the growth of emerging GPTs may be endangered by the selection of some “dead ends” in their technological trajectories, which prevent the development of follow-up invention. In the management literature, this issue has been mainly investigated through a macro-level perspective, analyzing GPTs as a whole. However, inventor organizations—especially firms—can play a pivotal role in shaping technological trajectories through their search strategies. Focusing on a specific emerging GPT, Wearable Haptics Technology (WHT), this paper tries to understand whether search strategies aimed at expanding the knowledge recombination pool, with varying degrees of familiarity for ecosystem actors, facilitate or hinder the evolution of this emerging GPT. To answer this research question, we identified the WHT patents and analyzed the resulting 1,261 patent-applicant pairs. Our analysis shows that follow-up inventions are less likely when the focal patent explores a new application domain for the whole WHT domain. Conversely, patents are more likely to serve as a foundation for subsequent inventions when they draw on a larger share of backward knowledge that is entirely new to the whole WHT domain.