Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation

Abstract

Is small really beautiful? A review of the concept of niches in innovation This article reviews the concept of innovation niches through three categories: strategic niche management (SNM), specialised markets and niches formed as a technology declines. In the literature, innovation niches generate interest from both innovation and marketing perspectives. This review focuses predominately on the former from which the niche types have been adopted and analysed. Mostly, contributions since 1980 have been included, representing the period of academic interest in innovative small firms, while both temporal and locational filters were applied to the study. It is noted that SNM has been proposed as a means to protect potentially useful innovations from full market competition, while specialist niches supply technologies to few customers in more stable environments. Incumbent technologies at the stage of decline may also retreat to niches where they can still remain competitive. Finally, it is suggested that further research on innovation niches would extend our understanding of technology dynamics.

Emissions Trends and Drivers

“…The shorter lifetimes of small technologies allow users to take advantage of new performance improvements (Knapp 1999) and access a large set of small adopters (Finger et al 2019). Other mechanisms for faster adoption are distinctly related to markets: modular technologies can address a wide variety of niche markets (Geels 2018) with different willingness to pay (Nemet 2019) and strategically fi nd protected niches while technology is maturing (Coles et al 2018). Light blue shaded areas show the range between the 5th and 95th percentiles in each year.…”

Spatiotemporal Evolution and Cause Analysis of Innovation Ecosystem Niche Fitness: A Case Study of the Yellow River Basin

“…The foundation for the development of innovation producers lies in the innovation environment, which includes four elements: factor environment [27], market environment [28], technology environment [29], and economic environment [30]. Among them, the factor environment includes the direct innovative resources involved in innovative activities, while the market environment refers to market conditions that have a significant impact on innovative activities.…”

“…A prosperous resource endowment signifies abundant innovation inputs, which are fundamental to the accomplishment of innovative outcomes. Furthermore, technical renovation investment reflects firms' willingness to be primary subjects of the innovation ecosystem [29]. Higher technical renovation investment indicates that firms are willing to pay more for producing superior-value products with increased competitiveness.…”

The impact of enterprise niche on dual innovation performance: moderating role of innovation openness

“…Furthermore, it becomes easier to deeply integrate various heterogeneous knowledge resources. The wider niche can not only promote the creation of new knowledge and new technology to improve the efficiency of exploratory innovation (Wu et al, 2019;Pel and Kemp, 2020;Coles et al, 2018), but it also may reduce the innovation cost and investment risk of enterprises. This will further enhance the willingness of enterprises to carry out exploratory innovation (Coles et al, 2018;Kim et al, 2016) and enter the virtuous circle of innovation.…”