The 'sailing-ship effect' as a technological principle

The ‘sailing-ship effect’ is the process whereby improvements to an incumbent technology (e.g. sail) are intentionally sought as a new competing technology (steam) emerges. Despite the fact that the effect has been referred to by quite a few scholars in different technological battles, the effect itself seems to have been taken for granted rather than organically defined and investigated. In this paper, within the context of evolutionary ‘appreciative theorising’ à la Nelson and Winter, through in-depth study of technological battles between old and new technologies, we transform what was an unfinished concept into a structured, fully-fledged, tool of analysis.