About
My career has focused on how new technologies emerge and diffuse as a professor and…
Articles by Dr. Jeffrey
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Gaming the Systems of Venture Capital and R&D
Gaming the Systems of Venture Capital and R&D
By Dr. Jeffrey Funk
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The Future of Professional Work: Expect Gradual Changes from AI and other New Technologies
The Future of Professional Work: Expect Gradual Changes from AI and other New Technologies
By Dr. Jeffrey Funk
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AI and Hype: An Assessment of McKinsey’s Forecast for Artificial Intelligence
AI and Hype: An Assessment of McKinsey’s Forecast for Artificial Intelligence
By Dr. Jeffrey Funk
Experience
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Independent Consultant
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Education
Publications
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AI and Economic Productivity: Expect Evolution, Not Revolution
IEEE Spectrum
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What’s Behind Technological Hype? Start-up losses are mounting and innovation is slowing. We need less hype and more level-headed economic analysis
Issues in Science and Technology
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What Does Innovation Today Tell Us About the Economy Tomorrow? Above all, that the nation needs to get a lot better at linking scientific advance to commercially and socially valuable technologies
Issues in Science and Technology
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Assessing public forecasts to encourage accountability: The case of MIT's Technology Review
PLOS One
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Technology Change, Economic Feasibility and Creative Destruction: The Case of New Electronic Products and Services
Industrial and Corporate Change
This paper shows how new forms of electronic products and services become economically feasible and thus candidates for commercialization and creative destruction as improvements in standard electronic components such as microprocessors, memory, and displays occur. Unlike the predominant viewpoint in which commercialization is reached as advances in science facilitate design changes that enable improvements in performance and cost, most new forms of electronic products and services are not…
This paper shows how new forms of electronic products and services become economically feasible and thus candidates for commercialization and creative destruction as improvements in standard electronic components such as microprocessors, memory, and displays occur. Unlike the predominant viewpoint in which commercialization is reached as advances in science facilitate design changes that enable improvements in performance and cost, most new forms of electronic products and services are not invented in a scientific sense and the cost and performance of them are primarily driven by improvements in standard components. They become candidates for commercialization as the cost and performance of standard components reach the levels necessary for the final products and services to have the required levels of performance and cost. This suggests that when managers, policy makers, engineers, and entrepreneurs consider the choice and timing of commercializing new electronic products and services, they should understand the composition of new technologies, the impact of components on a technology’s cost, performance and design, and the rates of improvement in the components.
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IT and Sustainability: New Strategies for Reducing Carbon Emissions and Resource Usage in Transportation
Telecommunications Policy
This paper describes how rapid rates of improvement in smart phones, telecommunication systems and other forms of IT enable solutions for sustainability and how this provides opportunities for the fields of telecommunication and information systems. While reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on technologies with rates of improvement less than 5% per year, most types of information technologies are experiencing annual rates of improvement that exceed 30% per year…
This paper describes how rapid rates of improvement in smart phones, telecommunication systems and other forms of IT enable solutions for sustainability and how this provides opportunities for the fields of telecommunication and information systems. While reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focuses on technologies with rates of improvement less than 5% per year, most types of information technologies are experiencing annual rates of improvement that exceed 30% per year. These rapid rates of improvement are changing the economics of many activities of which this paper describes four examples in transportation. The paper concludes by discussing challenges for universities and in particular for the fields of telecommunications and information systems.
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Rapid Improvements with No Commercial Production: How do the improvements occur? Research Policy 44(3): 777-788, 2015 (second author is Chris Magee)
Elsevier
This paper empirically examines 13 technologies in which significant cost and performance improvements occurred even while no commercial production occurred. Since the literature emphasizes cost reductions through increases in cumulative production, this paper explores cost and performance improvements from a new perspective. The results demonstrate that learning in these pre-commercial production cases arises through mechanisms utilized in deliberate R&D efforts. We identity three mechanisms -…
This paper empirically examines 13 technologies in which significant cost and performance improvements occurred even while no commercial production occurred. Since the literature emphasizes cost reductions through increases in cumulative production, this paper explores cost and performance improvements from a new perspective. The results demonstrate that learning in these pre-commercial production cases arises through mechanisms utilized in deliberate R&D efforts. We identity three mechanisms - materials creation, process changes, and reductions in feature scale – that enable these improvements to occur and use them to extend models of learning and invention. These mechanisms can also apply during post commercial time periods and further research is needed to quantify the relative contributions of these three mechanisms and those of production-based learning in a variety of technologies.
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Industry Architecture, the Product Life Cycle, and Entrepreneurial Opportunities: The Case of the U.S. Broadcasting Sector,
Industrial and Corporate Change 24 (1): 65-91, 2015
This article uses concepts from the literatures of industry architecture and the product life cycle model to analyze the evolution of entrepreneurial opportunities in the US broadcasting sector. Using the literature on industry architecture, it analyzes the specific events that led to the emergence of vertical disintegration and entrepreneurial opportunities where these events impacted on an interaction between capabilities and transaction costs. Second, by analyzing the number of firms in…
This article uses concepts from the literatures of industry architecture and the product life cycle model to analyze the evolution of entrepreneurial opportunities in the US broadcasting sector. Using the literature on industry architecture, it analyzes the specific events that led to the emergence of vertical disintegration and entrepreneurial opportunities where these events impacted on an interaction between capabilities and transaction costs. Second, by analyzing the number of firms in multiple layers, it shows how the numbers of firms depend on economies of scale, the number of submarkets, and the number and size of firms in adjacent layers. The interaction between different layers suggests that more analyses of multiple layers within an industry are needed.
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Open Standards, Vertical Disintegration, and Entrepreneurial Opportunities: How vertically- specialized firms entered the U.S. semiconductor industry, (second author is Jianxi Luo)
Technovation 45-46: 52-62, 2015
This paper shows how the emergence of open standards has created large numbers of entrepreneurial opportunities in the semiconductor industry by enabling vertical specialization. Integrating data on firms and technology evolution, we find a gradual increase in the percentage of firms represented by newly-founded “de novo” entrepreneurial startups, instead of “de alio” ones, as open standards emerged in semiconductor products and processes over the life of the industry. This standardization…
This paper shows how the emergence of open standards has created large numbers of entrepreneurial opportunities in the semiconductor industry by enabling vertical specialization. Integrating data on firms and technology evolution, we find a gradual increase in the percentage of firms represented by newly-founded “de novo” entrepreneurial startups, instead of “de alio” ones, as open standards emerged in semiconductor products and processes over the life of the industry. This standardization reduced transaction costs and fostered specialization, thus facilitating the entry of vertically-specialized new ventures. Vice versa, the rise of such new ventures further pushed the adoption of open standards, and the vertical disintegration of the industry. Our theory on how standardization creates opportunities for new ventures and our analysis of the semiconductor industry contribute to the technology entrepreneurship literature, as well as the industry architecture literature that has primarily focused on the impact of standardization on the disintegration of vertically- integrated incumbents.
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What Drives Exponential Improvements?
California Management Review
This paper explains the drivers of exponential improvements. Some technologies experience exponential improvements because they benefit from reductions in scale. For example, reductions in transistors and memory cells enable Moore's Law. Other technologies experience exponential improvements because new materials are created to better exploit physical phenomenon. For example, rapid improvements in LEDs and OLEDs occurred because scientists and engineers created new materials that better…
This paper explains the drivers of exponential improvements. Some technologies experience exponential improvements because they benefit from reductions in scale. For example, reductions in transistors and memory cells enable Moore's Law. Other technologies experience exponential improvements because new materials are created to better exploit physical phenomenon. For example, rapid improvements in LEDs and OLEDs occurred because scientists and engineers created new materials that better exploited the phenomenon of electroluminescence. Most importantly, many higher level systems such as electronic products and services benefit from these rapid improvements and thus most new business opportunities emerge from entrepreneurs creating new products and services from better components. Examples includes smart phones, apps, and Internet contents and services. This research was reported in the Financial Times: Relax about robots but worry over climate change, Robin Harding, July 27, 2016
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Technology Change and the Rise of New Industries
Stanford University Press
Using an analysis of many existing and emerging industries, this book (forthcoming in 2012) shows how one can analyze the timing of new industry formation. It does this by analyzing the improvements in cost and performance that have enabled new technologies to become economically feasible.
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The Unrecognized Connection between Vertical Disintegration and Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Long Range Planning 45(1): 41-59, 2012.
This article shows how the emergence of vertical disintegration has been a major source of
entrepreneurial opportunities in three sectors of the U.S. economy. Not only does it enable
more than one hundred thousand firms to co-exist in these sectors, but changes in the
levels of vertical disintegration continue to occur, and continue to create entrepreneurial
opportunities. This suggests that recognizing how and when vertical disintegration
emerges are critical issues for…This article shows how the emergence of vertical disintegration has been a major source of
entrepreneurial opportunities in three sectors of the U.S. economy. Not only does it enable
more than one hundred thousand firms to co-exist in these sectors, but changes in the
levels of vertical disintegration continue to occur, and continue to create entrepreneurial
opportunities. This suggests that recognizing how and when vertical disintegration
emerges are critical issues for entrepreneurs. This article shows how reductions in transaction
costs, which can come from the emergence of open modular designs, open standards,
and legal, regulatory and firm decisions, drive the emergence of vertical
disintegration and thus the emergence of many entrepreneurial opportunities. -
Complexity, Critical Mass, and Industry Formation: A Comparison of Selected of Industries
Industry and Innovation 17(5): 483-502, October, 2010
This paper uses a typology of industries to summarize and contrast the challenges involved with industry formation and to examine why specific industries were formed in some countries before other ones. The formation of most new industries depends on the introduction of products that provide a superior “value proposition” to some set of users where their introduction requires new R&D-related capabilities in firms. However, industries whose products require a critical mass of users or…
This paper uses a typology of industries to summarize and contrast the challenges involved with industry formation and to examine why specific industries were formed in some countries before other ones. The formation of most new industries depends on the introduction of products that provide a superior “value proposition” to some set of users where their introduction requires new R&D-related capabilities in firms. However, industries whose products require a critical mass of users or complementary products for growth to continue and ones that involve complex systems face additional challenges.
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Components, Systems and Discontinuities: The case of magnetic recording and playback equipment
Research Policy 38(7): 1192-1202, September 2009.
Using the history of magnetic recording and playback equipment, this paper explores the relationship between incremental improvements in components and technological discontinuities in systems. It finds that improvements in components have been the major source of all discontinuities in the industry. Focusing just on tape-based systems, all of the basic design approaches had been identified by the late 1950s and thus one of the largest technological challenges for firms has been to modify the…
Using the history of magnetic recording and playback equipment, this paper explores the relationship between incremental improvements in components and technological discontinuities in systems. It finds that improvements in components have been the major source of all discontinuities in the industry. Focusing just on tape-based systems, all of the basic design approaches had been identified by the late 1950s and thus one of the largest technological challenges for firms has been to modify the design in response to improvements in the magnetic recording density of tape. This paper explores this phenomenon by analyzing data on equipment performance and price, and several design choices for the tape-based equipment. It shows how improvements in the magnetic recording density have changed the tradeoffs that exist between price and different dimensions of performance and between various design choices and thus led to about 10 technological discontinuities in magnetic tape system design.
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Other publications can be found on Research Gate (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey_Funk) or on Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com.sg/citations?user=AlOmnsQAAAAJ&hl=en)
See links
Honors & Awards
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NTT DoCoMo Mobile Science Award
NTT DoCoMo
Awarded for lifetime contributions to the social science aspects of mobile communication. Details are only available in Japanese: http//www.mcfund.or.jp/mobilescience/award/no3.html
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Fulbright Research Scholar at Tokyo University
Fulbright Association
Researching Japanese companies during the summers of 1993 and 1994
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