Time wars: is there a declining financial justification for rapid technical advance in the telecommunications industry?

This paper has two principal objectives and focuses on the telecom industry to pursue them. The first is to explore how a broader industry investment climate takes shape and then functions to substantially constrain firm-level strategies to promote rapid technical advance. The second is to examine how organizational innovations in the form of ad hoc producer alliances emerge spontaneously in response to stiffening investment challenges. An effort is made to extrapolate from these dynamics to the prospects for managing and accessing telecom innovation in the foreseeable future