Specializing in Generality? Technology and Market Strategy
We study the technological and organizational determinants of technology and market strategy. In particular, we examine the choice of specializing in generality, where firms decide to invest in the general technologies as opposed to specialized technologies, and to serve intermediate rather than final product markets. We use data from 6,417 US technology companies listed on Crunchbase. We use natural language processing to measure market strategy based on text on firms’ websites, and access firms’ GitHub accounts to measure technology strategy. Our results suggest that firms that specialize in generality are more likely to develop infrastructure and data-driven software technologies, technologies without physical components, and are more often profit-oriented firms. We discuss managerial and policy implications with respect to general purpose technologies.