THE ORGANIZATIONAL EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL TECHNOLOGICAL COMPETITION

Abstract Various industries are marked,by rapid technological change and increasingly global competition. We explain how such developments,provide a context for “Red Queen” competition, where organizational learning and competition accelerate each other over time. Arguing that competition stimulates organizational development, we predict that organizations experiencing a history of competition are less likely to fail. This implies that a strategy of technologicaldifferentiation generates short-run survival advantages, but backfires over time as isolated organizations suffer from increasing rates of failure. Also, we argue that the Red Queen magnifies differences in competitiveness among organizations due to underlying differences in their propensities to learn, so that