Winch, Graham W., "Understanding the Dynamics of Technology Switching in Seeking to Maintain International Competitiveness", 1995
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When firms face the possibility of making fundamental change, as opposed to incremental improvements, to maintain their competitiveness, their senior teams face particularly uncertain times. This paper focuses on a system dynamics model that captures that situation of an industry experiencing the switching of its production plans to a new process technology. The model enables the complexity of this situation to be represented, and facilitates a clearer understanding of the expected industry dynamics. The results show that an individual firm facing the up-grade decision must consider the impacts of the change across a number of dimensions, and demonstrates that the point in time along the industry's endemic capacity-building / price cycle may have an important impact on the economics of the decision. The paper is also able to draw some comparisons between this and the other approaches to modelling technology change decision-some comparisons between this and other approaches to modelling technology change decision-making.