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Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on July 10, 2006
Enterprise and Society 2006 7(3):456-461; doi:10.1093/es/khl005
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Comment: Exploring the Context of Use

Margaret B. W. Graham

MARGARET B. W. GRAHAM is associate professor at Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. Contact information: 1001 Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada. E-mail: margaret.graham@mcgill.ca.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

I am grateful to JoAnne Yates and to Hagley Mills for offering us the opportunity to focus on the subject of the role of user firms in developing technology. This theme has been implicit in much of my work on the history of innovating companies, but I have written my histories of innovation and innovative companies from the viewpoint of the primary innovators, the developers of technologies.1 I agree with JoAnne that business historians have much to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the role of the user firm. Thanks to management scholars like Eric von Hippel, ‘user need’ is a common notion in the management literature on innovation, but it is relatively rare for historians to examine innovations from the perspective of an adopting firm or industry, as JoAnne has done with the life insurance industry. It is rarer still for historians to examine both perspectives at the . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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