ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the product, summarizes the history of the pacemaker industry and identifies key advances in pacing technology that were commercialized between 1959 and 1990. The product is an internal device that provides electrical stimuli to the heart muscle in order to control the heart rate. The chapter also identifies the specific innovations in pacing that will be used to test the hypotheses and classify them as either cumulative or discrete. Firms tended to concentrate on making the pacer more physiologically responsive and dependable—and so began the era of incremental change. The chapter focuses on the innovations that occurred in the industry at large and not on the individual pacing firms that introduced the innovation to the market. The advantages then of being the first-to-market with a cumulative change in the product technology are great. The persistence of demand for older product generations may decrease the negative effects of failure to implement cumulative changes.
