The notion of technological opportunity: Theoretical and empirical analysis.

Summary Corporate innovation raises major questions about the measurement of the concept of technological opportunity. The objective of this thesis is to perform a theoretical analysis of the criteria for revealing and exploiting these opportunities (technology waves, S-curve, Gartner's Hype Curve), and then to test this approach in software publishing. We first demonstrate, through a case study of 3 French technology companies, that each criterion has a limited scope. We then establish a link between R&D intensity, technology cycles and financial markets, through an analysis of the aggregate evolution of R&D expenditures (indicator of the number of opportunities) and of the market capitalization of a sample of 438 software companies from 17 countries over 1994-2005. Finally, we conclude, via a correlation analysis on 3 software publishers as well as our previous sample, that R&D expenses and stock prices tend to evolve in a parallel manner.