Diffusion Patterns in Convergence among High-Technology Industries: A Co-Occurrence-Based Analysis of Newspaper Article Data

Abstract

Firms in high-technology industries have faced great technological and market uncertainty and volatility in the past few decades. In order to be competitive and sustainable in this environment, firms have been pursuing technological innovation, product differentiation, vertical integration, and alliances, which eventually drive industry convergence, defined as the process of blurring boundaries between previously distinct industries. Although industry convergence has greatly affected industrial structure and the economy, little research has investigated this phenomenon, especially its diffusion patterns; thus, it is still unclear which industries are converging more rapidly or have a higher potential for convergence. This paper explores these issues by investigating industry convergence in U.S. high-technology industries, using a large set of newspaper articles from 1987 to 2012. We perform a co-occurrence-based analysis to obtain information on industry convergence and estimate its diffusion patterns using an internal-influence logistic model. We find heterogeneous diffusion patterns, depending on convergent-industry pairs and their wide dispersion. In addition, we find that the potential degree of industry convergence is significantly negatively associated with its growth rate, which indicates that a great deal of time will be required for industry convergence between high-technology industries with this high potential to achieve a high degree of convergence.

A new framework to assess industry convergence in high technology environments

“…Based on this temporal classification of industry convergence, an opportunity to detect the actual step of industry convergence at a very early point in time is presented. This timeframe also contributes to the literature on the speed of industry convergence, such as the work by Lee et al (2016), which investigates Thirdly, convergence researchers urgently called for a suitable measure to assess and anticipate industry convergence (see e.g. Kim et al, 2018), which, up to now, mainly relied on technology convergence as an early indicator for a possibly upcoming industry convergence.…”

Ambidexterity in External Knowledge Search Strategies and Innovation Performance: Mediating Role of Balanced Innovation and Moderating Role of Absorptive Capacity

“…Firms are likely to suffer from obsolescence when they source all relevant knowledge within their organizational boundaries [32,33]. Particularly in today's business environment where a convergence of diverse inter-industry knowledge is important [34][35][36], exploitation relying exclusively on prior knowledge within a firm may result in a competitive disadvantage in the current market. Indeed, many firms are searching for and acquiring valuable knowledge through distant search beyond their industrial boundaries to ensure their current viability [18,37].…”

Threshold Effect of High-Tech Industrial Scale on Green Development—Evidence from Yangtze River Economic Belt

“…Some scholars provided a more detailed analysis of the internal mechanism of promoting economic growth through the high-tech industry [15]. The growth of high-tech industries has a strong multiplier effect on driving the development of related industries [16] and accelerates the rapid growth of the national economy. Some researchers described the relationship from the perspective of industrial R&D [17,18] by establishing the endogenous economic growth model based on R&D and reported that technological progress was the endogenous source of long-term economic growth.…”