Industrial Market Behaviour and the Technological Life Cycle

The product life cycle is the cornerstone to understanding product/market behaviour, but it is not well suited to the analysis of industrial markets. In the industrial marketplace technology can be isolated as the dominant variable, explaining variations in sales over time for a product category. New “high‐tech” firms must make the critical decision early in their life as to whether to follow their technology through its life cycle, adapting to the needs of each stage it goes through, or whether to specialise in one particular stage of technology and continually develop new products to replace those that progress to later stages of the technological life cycle.