  Killer technology is a radical innovation, based on new products and/or
processes, that with high technical and/or economic performance destroys the
usage value of established techniques previously sold and used. Killer
technology is a new concept in economics of innovation that may be useful for
bringing a new perspective to explain and generalize the behavior and
characteristics of innovations that generate a destructive creation for
sustaining technical change. To explore the behavior of killer technologies, a
simple model is proposed to analyze and predict how killer technologies destroy
and substitute established technologies. Empirical evidence of this theoretical
framework is based on historical data on the evolution of some example
technologies. Theoretical framework and empirical evidence hint at general
properties of the behavior of killer technologies to explain corporate,
industrial, economic and social change and to support best practices for
technology management of firms and innovation policy of nations. Overall, then,
the proposed theoretical framework can lay a foundation for the development of
more sophisticated concepts to explain the behavior of vital technologies that
generate technological and industrial change in society.
