The Population Ecology of Technology: An Empirical Study of US Biotechnology Patents from 1976 to 2003

Abstract

A detailed understanding of technological change as an evolutionary process is currently not well understood. To increase our understanding, we build upon theory from organizational ecology to develop a model of endogenous technological growth and determine to what extent the pattern of technological growth can be attributed to the structural or systemic characteristics of the technology itself. Through an empirical investigation of patent data in the biotechnology industry from 1976 to 2003, we find that a technology’s internal (i.e., density and diversity) ecological characteristics have a positive effect on its growth rate. The niche’s external characteristics of crowding and status have a negative effect on its growth rate. Hence, applying theory from organizational ecology increases our understanding of technological change as an evolutionary process. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of technological growth and evolution, and suggest avenues for further research.

Technological entry in new niches: Diversity, crowding and generalism

“…3 An emerging stream of research unpacks environmental factors from the perspective of ecology, a field of investigation that studies the interactions between focal entities-biological or technological-in their respective environmental niches, and that is being proposed as a platform from which we can better understand evolutionary processes in technology (Coccia, 2019a;Coccia and Watts, 2020). This stream of research, also known as 'technological ecology', centers on the concept of 'technological niche' and on the dynamics that take place inside it (Podolny and Stuart, 1995;Van den Oord and Van Witteloostuijn, 2017).…”

“…Given the complexity of inventive problems (Baumann et al, 2019;Fleming and Sorenson, 2001;Ganco, 2017) combined with bounded rationality (Simon, 1955(Simon, , 1962, firms tend to search 'locally' within their current domains (Greve, 1996;Levinthal and March 1993;Levinthal, 1997;March, 1991), and this exposes them to localized niche pressures. This requires a niche theory, which we borrow from the technological ecology literature (Coccia, 2019a;Coccia and Watts, 2020), based on which we operationalize current and new technological domains with the specific construct of current and new technological niches (Podolny and Stuart, 1995;Van den Oord and Van Witteloostuijn, 2017). In ecology, the concept of niche was introduced to describe a particular configuration of scarce resources and of a population of biological entities, and how the population itself responds to this configuration (Elton, 1927;Popielarz and Neal, 2007).…”

“…In innovation, a technological niche refers to a configuration of resources in the technological space and of a population of firms that, in different degrees, depend on these resources for their viability (Podolny and Stuart, 1995). More precisely, we define a technological niche as a system consisting of several related technological inventions (in the form of patents) apportioned into categories (technological subclasses) ( Van den Oord and Van Witteloostuijn, 2017).…”

A multi-level model of emerging technology: An empirical study of the evolution of biotechnology from 1976 to 2003

“…Even though density dependence logic has been primarily applied to organizational populations [ 51 ], recent research suggests that this argument can also be effectively applied to other settings as well, such as the domain of national laws [ 52 , 53 ] and organizational rules [ 54 , 55 ]. In this paper, we argue that density dependence logic can also be fruitfully utilized to study technological populations, as technologies also need to be legitimized [ 13 , 56 , 57 , 58 , 59 ] and compete with one another for the attraction of resources and attention [ 60 , 61 ].…”

“…Second, by applying concepts from organizational ecology to the study of technology, we effectively combine evolutionary and ecological models in the study of the evolution of technology (cf. [ 13 ]). That is, by combining the different perspectives of environmental selection and adaptation, we demonstrate the added value of applying both views at the same time, and provide a platform for their further recombination (cf.…”