Improvements experienced by incumbent “old” technologies when threatened by new ones, potentially supplanting them, are often addressed as the “sailing-ship effect.” The latter phrase points to the eponymous case that consists of the 60-year or so technological battle between sail and steam in ships’ propulsion during the 19th century, which led to unexpected large advancements in sail technology. Paradoxically, until today, the only work which addressed quantitatively that technological battle actually found a lack of evidence of the occurrence of the sailing-ship effect. In this paper, through fresh statistical analysis, we find instead confirmation of the existence of the effect in the original case. This finding contributes to the theoretical debate that explains technological persistence through mechanisms such as path dependence, cumulativeness, localized technical progress, competence and cognitive traps, the presence of complementary assets and tributary innovations, as well as institutional features. Policy dimensions are considered in Section 7 of the work.

中文翻译：

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“帆船效应”是不是用错了名字？海上运输中风帆与蒸汽案例的统计调查

现有“旧”技术在受到新技术威胁时所经历的改进，可能会取代它们，通常被称为“帆船效应”。后一个短语指的是 19 世纪帆与蒸汽在船舶推进方面长达 60 年左右的技术大战，导致帆技术取得意想不到的巨大进步。矛盾的是，直到今天，唯一从数量上解决那场技术战的工作实际上发现缺乏帆船效应发生的证据。在本文中，通过新的统计分析，我们发现原案例中效果的存在得到了证实。这一发现有助于通过路径依赖等机制解释技术持久性的理论辩论，累积性、本地化技术进步、能力和认知陷阱、互补资产和支流创新的存在，以及制度特征。工作的第 7 节考虑了政策层面。