Framing Contests in the Emergence of Dominant Design

In my dissertation, I study how firms with competing technologies are competing first to shape the market’s cognition about what those technologies really are. When a new technology is brought to market, potential buyers may be unsure as to what the product is, and why it exists. For the technology to succeed, market participants have to develop some sort of understanding of it. Participants’ technological frames form the cognitive underpinnings of purchase, research, and investment decisions, and can influence the technology’s development trajectory (Kaplan & Tripsas, 2008). These frames are often heavily influenced by discourse in the marketplace. In these framing contests, firms battle to shape how participants frame the technology. By shaping the collective cognition of the market, firms aim to make their design dominant, and ultimately triumph in the economic contest. Prior research on dominant design has emphasized technical and economic factors, only recently considering cognitive factors. I identify factors in technology contests that make these markets act more or less like social movements, and identify that some of the previously identified technical and economic factors are likely mediated by the participants’ frames. Empirically, I examine the smartphone industry, with emergence of the dominant keyboard and then multitouch designs. I make a novel contribution by using latent semantic analysis (LSA) to study framing discourse. I first explore how best to use LSA to measure frames and related constructs in the market and firm discourse. I then apply LSA to observe the framing contests that occurred during the emergence of these two designs. I test hypotheses about how framing contests unfold, and are fought, and how the emergence of market-wide frames influences the emergence of dominant technological designs.

Committee Chair: VK Narayanan, Associate Dean for Research and Deloitte Touche Jones Stubbs Professor of Management Committee Co-Chair: David Gefen, Provost Distinguished Research Professor of Management Information Systems Committee Member: Jade Yu-chieh Lo, Assistant Professor of Management Committee Member: Rajiv Nag, Assistant Professor of Management Committee Member: Kai Larsen, Associate Professor of Management & Entrepreneurship, Leeds Business School, University of Colorado, Boulder