The Business History of New Technologies

This special issue draws together a number of articles linked to the theme of the business history of new technologies. All of them were submitted to the Business History Review in the normal course of operations, but they are grouped together here because of their common concerns and interlinkages. The articles cover numerous wide-ranging issues, but it may be particularly worthwhile to point out the light they shed on a number of related discussions about the role of internal and external sources of innovation in the firm, the creation of organizational capabilities, and the proprietary control of innovation in some of the dominant new product technologies of the twentieth century: microcomputers, videocassette recorders, telephones . . . and chickens—that is, chickens in their capacity as the material for genetic engineering.