Introduction

An everyday observation about technological innovation is that some firms seem to make better technological choices than others. Common sense tells us that innovators have great technological reach, that they possess an uncanny capacity for divining the marketplace and offering timely and exciting products or services. It is difficult not to attribute these differential rates of success to the technological “foresight” of first movers and/or to the technological “oversights” of laggards. First movers are visionaries with a knack for making the right choice among highly uncertain technological options. Laggards, on the other hand, miss opportunities by being wedded to the past, and thus forego future gains. These dispositional attributions frame foresight and oversight as issues of cognitive competence – some firms have technological vision, while others don't. Moreover, to the extent that cognitive competence can be measured and manipulated, dispositionalizing means that the propensity for foresights and oversights can be engineered. Technologists, consultants, and managers can create organizing routines that promote creativity, enhance the innovativeness of design, and generally incite firms to be recipe-makers rather than recipe-takers.