Flatirons Seminar in the History of Computing, Information and Society

This talk reviews and synthesizes many well-document episodes of successful outsiders, and how their innovative commercial activity generated responses from established firms in computing markets and the commercial Internet. Examples include Encarta from Microsoft, the search engine from Google, text ads from Craigslist, and other canonical competitive episodes. A central question concerns the meaning of “outsider” in economic narratives, which usually stress factors that produce competitive disadvantages in relation to insiders. This talk will stress unequal access to key inputs or assets, perceptions/opinions that remain inconsistent with an insider’s view about how to generate market value, and/or exclusion from social hierarchies that aid commercial aims. The analysis stresses that outsiders and insiders face asymmetric economic incentives to innovate in the service of differentiated competitive entry. Importantly, more nurturing market environments at early moments play an important role.

Biography: Shane Greenstein is the Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and co-chair of the HBS Digital Initiative. He teaches in the Technology, Operations and Management Unit. Professor Greenstein is also co-director of the program on the economics of digitization at The National Bureau of Economic Research. He has formerly taught in the economics department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. His books include How the Internet Became Commercial; Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy (with Avi Goldberg and Catherine Tucker); Standards and Public Policy (with Victor Stango); Diamonds are Forever, Computers are Not; Communications Policy in Transition (with Benjamin Compaigne); Communications Policy and Information Technology (with Lorrie Faith Cranor); and Economics of Digitization (with Catherine Tucker). He holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University.