Paper Title
THE IMPACT OF ENTRY TIMING ON FIRM SURVIVAL

Abstract
Survival has long been recognized as a basic goal for a business organization (Suarez and Utterback, 1992) and recently studied more systematically in strategy. Researchers have proposed that a firm’s survival is linked to factors such as entry timing (Mitchell, 1991). However, the typical relationship between entry timing and firm survival is controversial, which seems likely that under some circumstances, market pioneers have higher survival rates while under other circumstances, they have lower survival rates. For instance, in semiconductor technology, in the early days it was firms like General Electric, Transitron, Hughes and Raytheon that spearheaded the development and commercialization of that technology. Yet, later entrants such as Texas Instrument, National Semiconductor, and Intel together with larger established firms, like Motorola, IBM and AT&T went on to become the dominant players in the new industry, while the original pioneers faded away (Tilles and McFarlan, 1971). Suarez and Utterback (1992) argued that a firm’s probability of surviving through time will be directly affected by a firm’s entry timing and the evolution of technology in the industry. The analysis by Christensen, Suarez and Utterback (1996) also suggested that “first-mover advantage” may not hold in fast-changing industries and the existence of a “window of opportunity” may be a more accurate way of conceptualizing the importance of entry timing in fast-paced industries. Thus, this complex relationship is important to resolve because the market pioneers’ survival problems can easily offset their market share advantages, and firms may be discouraged from investing in the costly and risky attempt to pioneer new markets (Min, Kalwani and Robinson, 2006). However, the relationship between entry timing and firm survival in a technology evolutionary environment has not been explored clearly in the past empirical literature. In this paper, I will use the patent growth rate to proxy as the pace of technological growth and the ratio of research and development funds to sales to measure technology intensity in order to examine the effect of these two components in a technology evolutionary environment on the entry timing and firm survival relationship. The contributions of this paper are specified as follows. First, unlike most of the variables identified in the literature which are concerned with the existence/nonexistence of specific environmental characteristics only at the time the entrants enter into the market, I use patent growth rate to proxy as the pace of technological growth, which varies in a specific industry according to time, to examine how it may affect the relationship between entry timing and survival. Second, I empirically investigate the role of technology evolutionary environment by introducing an explicitly dynamic dimension of the pace of technology growth and technology intensity in different industries, in enabling or disabling first mover advantage. While firm resources and capabilities are important factors in analyzing a firm’s ability to materialize first mover advantage, we should not ignore the technology environmental variables. This study also has some managerial implications. A firm entering into a fast-changing industry or more technology-intensive industry should carefully consider its timing decision. Managers that take action appropriately will dramatically reduce their companies’ probability of failure through the years. Thus, firm’s own decisions and strategy matter greatly.