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| S Curve
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| Introduction |
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The S-Curve emerged as a mathematical model and was afterwards applied to a variety of fields including physics, biology and economics.In the innovation management field the S-Curve illustrates the introduction, growth and maturation of innovations as well as the technological cycles that most industries experience. In the early stages large amounts of money, effort and other resources are expended on the new technology but small performance improvements are observed. Then, as the knowledge about the technology accumulates, progress becomes more rapid. As soon as major technical obstacles are overcome and the innovation reaches a certain adoption level an exponential growth will take place. During this phase relatively small increments of effort and resources will result in large performance gains. Finally, as the technology starts to approach its physical limit, further pushing the performance becomes increasingly difficult.
Usually the S-curve is represented as the variation of performance in function of the time/effort. Probably that is the most used metric because it is also the easiest to collect data for.Overall we can say that the S-Curve is a robust yet flexible framework to analyze the introduction, growth and maturation of innovations and to understand the technological cycles.
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| S curve - Example -Read-Write Head (Disk Drive) |
First Technology: incremental improvements to the original ferrite-head/oxide disk technology enabled manufacturers to grind the heads to smaller, more precise dimensions.
Second Technology: thin-film photolithography displaced ferrite-heads in most disk drives between 1979 and 1990.
Third Technology: magneto-resistive heads.
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