Installed Base

Technology markets often exhibit extreme path dependency, enabling random or idiosyncratic events to have dramatic effects on technology success or failure. However, these effects accrue in an ordered way: by impacting a set of factors that have predictable influences on technology adoption. Since firm strategy also impacts these factors, technology adoption is neither wholly random nor beyond the firm's control. In this article I build a model of these factors by integrating economics, strategy, and marketing research. The model yields important implications for the strategic development and deployment of technology.

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are envisioned to increase efficiency, transparency and equity, but realising this potential has proven problematic. We argue that insights from studies of large-scale, integrated but distributed information systems, dubbed "information infrastructures, " are applicable. This perspective may help address an important dimension of SDIs: their character of being public goods rather than private assets. We identify and illustrate four key aspects of information infrastructures that underpin such a public good’s focus. First, we advocate the necessity of deploying a socio-technical rather than a limited technical perspective. We further argue that the notion of installed base is central, that it is important to be aware of the "politics of representations " and to accept the unavoidable "messiness " of reality. We illustrate these concepts through examples from health care in developing countries, an area particularly con...