Technological Change and Market Structure: The Diffusion Dimension

I have been asked to discuss technological change and market structure. This might lead to expectations of a chapter on research and development spending, its relation to firm size and concentration and Schumpeterian hypotheses. If so, then I am afraid expectations will be disappointed. I will only be referring to R & D en passant. Instead I will be concentrating on the use of new technology, or technological diffusion, rather than its generation. There are several reasons for this. First, I feel that the R & D literature has been pretty well surveyed and explored elsewhere. Secondly, I am much more interested in diffusion than R & D and much more attuned to what is happening in the diffusion field. Third, and most importantly, I tend to feel that diffusion is the poor relation in the technological change literature. It has merited much less attention than R &D, although in reality it is only as diffusion proceeds and as new technologies are used that such new technologies have their impact and their benefits are realized. Finally, I do not actually know of a large body of work that relates diffusion to market structure, and thus exploring this particular issue is more exciting than looking once again at R & D.