PRUEBAS

CHAPTER THREEDisruptive TechnologicalChange in the MechanicalExcavator IndustryExcavators and their steam shovel predecessors are huge pieces of capital equipment sold to excavationcontractors. While few observers consider this a fast-moving, technologically dynamic industry, it haspoints in common with the disk drive industry: Over its history, leading firms have successfullyadopted a series of sustaining innovations, both incremental and radical, in components andarchitecture, but almost the entire population of mechanical shovel manufacturers was wiped out by adisruptive technology—hydraulics—that the leaders’ customers and their economic structure hadcaused them initially to ignore. Although in disk drives such invasions of established markets occurredwithin a few years of the initial emergence of each disruptive technology, the triumph of hydraulicexcavators took twenty years. Yet the disruptive invasion proved just as decisive and difficult tocounter in excavators as those in the disk drive industry. 1LEADERSHIP IN SUSTAINING TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGEFrom William Smith Otis’ invention of the steam shovel in 1837 through the early 1920s, mechanicalearthmoving equipment was steam-powered. A central boiler sent steam through pipes to small steamengines at each point where power was required in the machine. Through a system of pulleys, drums,and cables, these engines manipulated frontward-scooping buckets, as illustrated in Figure 3.1.Originally, steam shovels were mounted on rails and used to excavate earth in railway and canalconstruction. American excavator manufacturers were tightly clustered in northern Ohio and nearMilwaukee.Figure 3.1 Cable-Actuated Mechanical Shovel Manufactured by Osgood General60