The who and how of commercializing emerging technologies: A technology-focused review

Emerging technologies combine high expectations with market and technological uncertainty. Scholars are increasingly interested in the commercialization of such emerging technologies, existing studies have worked to identify the actors, dynamics, and contexts conducive to successful commercialization efforts. However, collecting and organizing the findings of these studies has been challenging as they cover a broad spectrum of technologies and have significant differences among them. To address this challenge, the present study reviews existing research on the commercialization of emerging technologies by taking the technology view, explicitly considering the technologies’ shared and distinctive attributes. We have conducted a systematic literature review covering 154 articles published in 43 journals over 28 years and structured the results around the distinct factors that allow emerging technologies to help generate innovation. Our analysis differentiates between proprietary and generic technologies to explain how new entrants and incumbents take emerging technologies to market, with substantially different paths to generating technology-based innovations. Ultimately, we use this technological heterogeneity as a lens to better understand the factors and dynamics behind how emerging technologies are commercialized and used as drivers of future innovation.