Technology Vision for Radical Innovation and Its Impact on Early Success

For firms involved with the very early stages of emergent radical innovation, technical goals are often held in the mind(s) of only one or a few individuals. The way these individuals mentally imagine or visualize such goals, or technology visions, provides an important looking glass for understanding a firm's progression along the path of involvement from a technical discontinuity toward project-level and organizational-level involvement with a given technology. Utilizing a large sample of firms engaged in radical innovation in North America and the United Kingdom, this empirical study examines the impact of five dimensions of technology vision on early success: benefits goals, efficiency goals, magnetism, specificity, and infrastructure clarity. Technology vision is found to have a significant positive impact on technical competitive advantage, early success with customers, and ability to attract capital, as measures of early success.