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 theorizing” 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.

中文翻译：

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作为技术原理的“帆船效应”

“帆船效应”是指随着新的竞争技术（蒸汽）出现而有意寻求对现有技术（例如帆）进行改进的过程。尽管这一效应在不同的技术战中被不少学者提及，但效应本身似乎被认为是理所当然的，而不是有机地界定和研究的。在本文中，在纳尔逊和温特的进化“欣赏理论”的背景下，通过对新旧技术之间的技术斗争的深入研究，我们将一个未完成的概念转化为一个结构化的、成熟的工具分析。