While there is a large amount of literature on the socio-cognitive theory of technology evolution, most has focused on the interpretations of technologies that are already in existence. The literature has barely attended to the role of forward-looking cognition—mental representations of possibilities in the future. How do innovators and entrepreneurs envision the possible, and how do they translate those abstract concepts into new material and social reality? This dissertation first synthesizes the vast literature on technology evolution, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of forward-looking cognition in the evolution of technology. Using a large amount of historical archival data on the US robotics industry, my two empirical papers investigate (a) how a distant vision co-evolves with the actual technologies at the level of the organizational field (b) how entrepreneurial solutions and entrepreneurial search problems are co-constructed at the firm level. In the first paper of my dissertation, I review the literature on the evolution of technology. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on technology evolution. This essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholarship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. I further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mechanisms—variation, selection, and retention—that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. I integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. I emphasize the need for a co-evolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. In the second paper of my dissertation, I examine how technological visions—mental representations of technological possibilities in the future—co-evolve with the actual technologies. This paper is set in the robotics industry. The existing literature has focused on how backward-looking interpretations of technology shape its subsequent trajectory, but has rarely examined the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. To examine this, I conducted an extensive archival qualitative study covering the evolution of the field of robotics during the 100-year period from 1921 to 2020. I find that in a future-oriented field, the direction of technology evolution is largely shaped by the field participants’ attempts to narrow the vision-reality gap—the perceived temporal gap between the distant vision and present reality. I identify six distinct mechanisms—linking means to the distant vision, constructing a medium-term vision, envisioning sequences, decomposing, reconstructing, and reintegrating—through which field participants strive to narrow the vision-reality gap. I also find that the vision-reality gap is extremely volatile, and can rapidly expand and contract when salient artifacts (or reverse salients) emerge. In this study, I contribute to the socio-cognitive view of technology by highlighting the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. In the third paper of the dissertation, I study the process through which an entrepreneurial search problem is constructed. Previous studies have focused on search for solutions to a given problem. However, literature on entrepreneurship suggests that many entrepreneurs often start from formulating a very broad, abstract problem that a novel technological means is envisioned to be able to solve in the future. Forward-looking cognition, the mental representations of possibilities in the future, lies behind the process of problem formulation. In order to examine how construction of problems affects search for solutions, I conducted a qualitative analysis of archival data about 58 entrepreneurial firms founded by 42 entrepreneurs in the robotics industry. I find that most entrepreneurial firms start by linking a novel technological means to an abstract problem, and then proactively identify a core constraint in the solution space. In order to bypass the constraint, they engage in decomposing and reconstructing a core problem. In the stage of pursuing product-market fit, the issue of identifying core attributes, or core evaluation criteria weighted by users is brought to the fore. This paper contributes to our understandings of entrepreneurial search by highlighting the cognitive underpinnings of problem formulation.

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