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Approaches in Technology Entrepreneurship: Dilemmas and Choices – Bricolage Versus Breakthrough

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Approaches in Technology Entrepreneurship: Dilemmas and Choices – Bricolage Versus Breakthrough Zhangjin Chen Student ID: 8450274 Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship Course Unite Code: BMAN61001 The University of Manchester December 2012 CONTENTS 1.0 Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 2.0 Bricolage versus Breakthrough----------------------------------------------------------- 2 2.1 Starting Position at Different Levels----------------------------------------=---------3 2.2 Wind Turbines: A Mirror to the Approaches------------------------------------------3 3.0 Bricolage: An Effective …show more content…

1. Starting Position at Different Levels In terms of the level of the starting position, Garud and Karnoe (2003) labelled technological paths as "bricolage", which stood for a low-tech start approach, and "breakthrough" the opposite. They also attributed the development of technologies to the involvement of a multiplicity of actors including people in the domains of design, use, evaluation and regulation. Actors interact in different ways and generate different functions accordingly. In bricolage, actors form accumulated inputs and interact with each other, hence triggering new technological paths. Although the approach has a lower start point, the process of incremental growth allows the transformation of emerging paths to enable higher functionality (Gavetti and Levinthal, 2000). On the contrary, the breakthrough approach usually targets breakthrough innovations with sophisticated technologies, neglecting the process of actors' interactions and feedbacks, thus making it more difficult to recover when problems occur due to a lack of systematic knowledge (Garud and Karnoe, 2003). 2. Wind turbines: A Mirror to the Approaches The properties of bricolage and breakthrough were mirrored vividly by the development of wind turbines in Denmark and the US. Starting with an early crude design, Denmark witnessed the incremental development of its wind turbines technology with

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