On 26 June Professor Fernando F. Suarez will present a seminar entitled:

Bridge or Trap? Intergenerational Hybrids during the Technological Transition in the U.S. Automobile Industry 2009-2021

Abstract
During the transition between technological regimes, incumbents often must choose entering the new market with products designed from scratch based on the new technology or to transition into the new market by keeping links with the old technology via hybrid products. Hybrid products have not been extensively studied; the scant literature to date has focused on the performance of individual components in hybrid products, or the effect of hybrid products on firms’ innovation metrics. The literature has been silent on what is arguably the most important metric: the market performance of hybrid products. We intend to fill this gap by theorizing that incumbents that focus on producing hybrids and that accumulate experience with hybrid products during technological discontinuities are associated with inferior market performance in the new market of products designed solely for the new technology. We test our hypothesis by using a unique dataset of the US automobile industry between 2009 and 2021, a period when the auto industry began their transition to electric vehicles. We evaluate the incumbents’ performance in the ongoing transition from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles. Our results show that the presence of, and experience with, hybrid products is negatively related to a firm’s market performance with products solely based on the new technology. Our finding suggests that following a hybrid strategy entails important limitations that firms need to carefully consider during technological transitions.

Everyone is welcome!