بهره گیری از مزیت ورودی اولیه : فن آوری های اختصاصی در مقابل رهبری هزینه

This research develops the relationships between the “early mover advantage” and a firm's market share. It tests hypotheses relating a firm's strategic choices and order of entry to market share on a cross-sectional data set of 1042 French manufacturing companies. The results support the persistence of an advantage for early movers. Furthermore, the development of proprietary technologies, considered as a capability to protect in-house knowledge from competition, has a leverage effect on the advantage of early moving. Finally, if cost leadership is a relevant strategy to gain market share, it is mostly beneficial for late entrants.

A company's market share is positively influenced by both early entry Lieberman and Montgomery, 1988 and Utterback, 1994 and cost leadership strategy (Porter, 1980). These two strategic decisions, however, are generally considered separately and rarely studied jointly, as if they were disconnected topics (Tellis et al., 2001). In this paper, we study the interactions of early entry with (1) proprietary technology and (2) cost leadership strategy. We firstly argue, in line with the First Mover Advantage literature (Lieberman and Montgomery, 1988), that early entry favors market share. Secondly, we assume that developing core proprietary technologies impacts positively market share. We hypothesize that the combination of entering early into a market with a proprietary technology has a leverage effect on market share. Early entrants into a business earn the highest benefits in terms of market share when they manage to support their early mover advantage with proprietary technologies that competitors cannot imitate. Finally, we study the interaction of early entry with a cost leadership strategy. A cost leadership strategy has a positive impact on market share in general (Porter, 1980), but we find that late followers benefit more from cost leadership strategy than early entrants. Evidence is given on a sample of 1042 French manufacturing companies.