Publisher's Synopsis
The prime objective of this book is to explore mechanisms for the diffusion of industrial innovations within industries. Technological change is the main factor of economic growth, and innovation diffusion, a major research area in technological change, is presented in a framework by synthesizing innovation diffusion literature from marketing, management, and economics. Understanding structures and forces driving the processes of innovation and diffusion require complex models. In this study, an industrial innovation or new technology is both a product innovation from the aspect of supplier firm and a process innovation from the perspective of buyer firms who adopt and use it in their processes. Often well-intentioned efforts to solve pressing organizational problems such as technological change cause unanticipated side effects which are termed as "counterintuitive behavior of social systems". System dynamics provides the use of feedback loops with mutual or recursive causality when studying complex systems.
