نوآوری و تغییرات تکراری در رهبری صنعتی: سه مرحله تغییر و پایداری در صنعت دوربین  Innovation and recurring shifts in industrial leadership: Three phases of change and persistence in the camera industry

1. Introduction Latecomer firms may have considerable difficulty catching up with industry leaders. Consumers frequently choose leading firms with better products, superior resources, and proven capabilities. Incumbent leaders strengthen their dominant position by leveraging their market power and building barriers to entry. Valuable assets resulting from market dominance, such as secure branding, good reputation, network effects, access to high-level information, and slack resources further reinforce their superior position. In this sense, many researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of market leadership and incumbent advantage. Interestingly, however, latecomers occasionally surpass incumbents andbecomenew industry leaders. Furthermore,this catch-up This research has been supported by the Center for Global Business and Research, Seoul National University. ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: hyo kang@haas.berkeley.edu (H. Kang), jsong@snu.ac.kr (J. Song). tends to occur repeatedly in many industries; new leaders subsequently lose the dominant market position to other rising firms. Although leading firms must have learned from their own experiences when catching up, they lose their technological edge and market competitiveness to challengers, just as former incumbents did before them. Despite the elaborate strategies and actions of new market leaders to satisfy consumers, they often seem powerless to prevent this pattern from being repeated. We investigate recurrent shifts in industrial leadership and the mechanisms behind them in the context of the interchangeablelens camera industry. In doing so, we look at multiple levels in two important dimensions of the industry. First, we identify recurrent shifts in leadership atthe firm level – thatis, shifts between (a group of) individual firms, sometimes occurring within economies – and also at the national level. Second, we note that catching up is not limited to explanatory factors relevant at the firm level. Leadership shifts that happen at the national level imply that analyses at the firm level cannot be exhaustive, and that broader perspectives and multiple levels of analysis are necessary. We therefore examine a wide range of explanatory factors that contribute to leadership shift or catch-up and their interactions on different levels..