ABSTRACT
The institutional climate for innovation is important to the behavior of industry. This chapter examines a series of innovations in the consumer electronics industry to explore the strategic role of management attitudes and practices in the management of technology. It shows that the case study of an industry will stimulate other empirical examinations of the consequences of prevalent US managerial precepts. Trends in management attitudes toward technology and innovation offer another explanation of the emergence in the 1970s of changes in performance. World War II gave great impetus to technology-based innovation and growth in industry. In the US consumer electronics industry in 1955, for example, the companies involved met most economic tests for a vital industry free of monopoly and barriers to entry, yet innovations failed to emerge.
