Impacts of Innovating Firms' Strategic signals on Market Participants' Market Success in the Context of a Standards War

To increase the likelihood of success of their market-focused innovations, firms that develop innovations for targeted markets regularly communicate with market participants in order to reduce the uncertainties participants hold regarding the firms’ innovations. Strategic market signals are one of the tactics used by these firms. While an innovating firm’s own signals can have significant impacts on the firm’s market success, signals delivered by the firm’s competitors could exert negative impacts on the firm’s market success in different ways. To examine such negative impacts, the paper develops three types of uncertainty (technical, market and standards) associated with the market-focused innovations as well as hypotheses related to the impacts of competitors’ innovation-focused strategic signals on innovating firms’ market success during the standards war. The findings have implications for both theory and practice.