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Discontinuous change threatens the value of incumbents' core knowledge and/or complementary assets. We extend prior research by examining the separate effects of a core discontinuity and a complementary asset discontinuity. We propose that incumbent firms' complementary assets that are non-scale free and costly to imitate affect the entrants' degree of dependence on the assets and in turn, the likelihood that incumbent firms will invest in the alternative technology. Evidence from incumbent electric utilities coping with solar energy generation technology and the emergence of an alternative model, distributed energy generation, support our arguments and demonstrate important theoretical and empirical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An understudied question in the strategy literature is whether firms in regulated, monopoly-like, markets respond to uncoordinated customer preferences. Conventional wisdom would suggest that due to high barriers to entry and low buyer bargaining power in these markets, customer influence on incumbent firms is minimal to non- existent. Our findings, however, suggest that firms in regulated, monopoly- like, markets may not be as immune to demand-side customer preferences as previously thought. We draw on the competitive dynamic literature to suggest that under certain conditions, technological innovation may offer customers access to products or services previously only provided by an incumbent firm. As a result, the incumbent firm faces new competitive pressures even in monopoly markets. We find that incumbent utilities respond to customers' adoption of distributed solar. We also identify important boundary conditions that moderate this effect. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of incumbent utilities' solar investments and customers' adoption of distributed solar from 2010 to 2017 in the U.S. electric utility industry. Our findings contribute to understanding how firms in regulated, monopoly-like markets respond to demand-side influences, despite a lack of competitive pressures from rival firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of new technology by incumbent firms is a multi-stage process in which each investment influences future decisions in a path-dependent manner. Building on the capability lifecycle framework, we look beyond initial adoption to investigate how prior new technology investments affect subsequent stages of new technology adoption through two modes. We demonstrate how past commitments along the value chain-dependence on old technology, complementary assets, and customer base-can work against the tendency to continue along a path, and thereby avoid lock-in. Heterogeneous resource commitments thus influence not only the timing of initial adoption, but also the further stages of a new technology's adoption. Our empirical context is incumbent utilities' foray into wind energy in the U.S. electricity industry between 2005 and 2015. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines mechanisms underlying how established firms redeploy their resources to an emerging, uncertain market. Unlike previous literature's focus on resource-based explanations, we draw attention to an underdeveloped contingency of uncertainty in explaining firm resource redeployment decision-making. Drawing on information- and competition-based theories, we (1) distinguish between the "flow" of recent competitor investments and the "stock" of cumulative investments and (2) formally demonstrate that strategic interactions complicate the information effect of recent competitor investments on resource redeployment decision- making. Our findings predict a U-shaped relationship between recent competitor investments and established firms' redeployment decision- making. We further examine how competitor similarity and existing capacity (stock) affect the U-shaped prediction. Our empirical context is the U.S. investor-owned electric utilities' entry into the solar generation market between 2002 and 2013. Our paper contributes to the resource redeployment literature and offers practical implications for business practitioners and policy makers on solar energy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A broad literature in strategy examines how competitors' presence affects the focal firm's strategic decision making. This stream of research identifies imitation and deterrence as two distinct patterns, and concludes with an inverted U- shaped relationship. Yet, we propose in this study that under environmental uncertainty competition could both strengthen and undermine the benefits of imitation, and consequently lead to a U-shaped relationship. Combining both information- and competition-based theories, we develop stylized models of how firms update their beliefs and make strategic decision under environmental uncertainty. The analytical results suggest a U-shaped relationship, and we find empirical evidence consistent with our predictions using data on the U.S. electric utility companies' commitment to develop utility-scale solar projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]