Framing Contests in the Emergence of Dominant Design: A Case Study in Smartphones

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 theorize 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 to by using latent semantic analysis (LSA) (Landauer, McNamara, Dennis, & Kintsch, 2006) to study framing discourse. I use LSA in multiple ways to explore how the technology and market evolved. Various kinds of visualizations offer distinct advantages and disadvantages in exploring and understanding the meanings extant in a semantic space. I find four distinct periods in the evolution of smartphones, from 1992-2010. These are consistent with both framing and technology lifecycle theories. I find that LSA can be used to unpack the meanings of terms within a set of text, and that the content of a document can be used to identify the firm which produced it. The data suggests the importance of both discursive and material framing in technology battles. It also suggests ways in which discursive opportunity can be manipulated as part of a framing contest.

Many thanks to Jake’s dissertation committee: Committee Chair: VK Narayanan, Deloitte Touche Jones Stubbs Professor of Management Committee Co-Chair: David Gefen, Provost Distinguished Research Professor of Decision Sciences and MIS Committee Member: Kai R. Larsen, Associate Professor of Information Management, Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder Committee Member: Yu-Chieh Lo, Assistant Professor of Management Committee Member: Rajiv Nag, Assistant Professor of Management