Forum 2025.4.9 David A. Kirsch
Date:April 9(Wednesday), 2025from 17:30 to 19:00 Topic:“Unlocking Generality: Resurfacing Uncertainty Across Applications of the Lithium-ion Battery” Speaker:David A. Kirsch(Associate Professor at the Robert H. Smith School of Business and the College of Information Studies (by courtesy) at the University of Maryland) Abstract:Studies of industry emergence have often generated insights from empirical contexts with a one-to-one correspondence between a technology and its application. In parallel, studies of general-purpose technologies (GPTs) have documented the economic impact and versatility of technologies with broad downstream applications, although these studies often abstract away from the endogenous and gradual process through which a single technology underpins multiple downstream markets, in practice assuming that “generality” is an…