New products and new technologies, when released into intellectual and commercial marketplaces, can display a wide variety of behavior. There are fads, unmitigated disasters, amazing takeoffs that go bust and, sadly only rarely, real long term roaring successes. Every new product and technology introduced is unique, but some dynamic behaviors are commonplace.
For concreteness we will look at the field of System Dynamics, and attempt to understand the role of a technology, such as Vensim, in the development of the field. We will start with a background description of the problem, put forward a number of hypotheses about what is going on and what policies might be helpful. We will then start building a model to help us test these hypotheses.
The model-building process we will use in this chapter is one of articulating and formalizing theories, and then attempting to incorporate them into a unified model. This process is usually not smooth, since many theories are ill formed and internally inconsistent. Trying to formalize an internally inconsistent theory will illuminate the problem; however, resolving the conflicting ideas so that they make sense can be difficult. Another common difficulty with this model-building process is that two theories can not always fit into a single framework. In some cases, it is easier to develop different models for different theories and then compare the models on the basis of behavior, Reality Checks and data.
