Speed of technology cycles and process/product innovation

The speed that new technology emerges has been speeding up over the course of our history with the reasons being plentiful. The idea in essence is that for instance writing took pretty darn long to emerge in its current form and be widely adopted throughout the world, but for instance computers went through the same cycle in a fraction of that time. I don't have the references off the cuff now, but I recall running across some papers on this issue a year or few back.

Recently I've also had to go back to basics and read a bit of Utterback and Abernathy, and other such guys, on industry evolution, ecology, and the whole shebang. Well, ok, Utterback and Abernathy looked at the swings between process and product innovation, and the simple thought from that is well summarized in Nelson's paper from 2001: product innovation is driven by the amount of firms in an industry, process innovation by the size of firms. In practice this means that when an industry or technology is emerging, small entrants are plentiful and thus product innovation is abound. Then when dominant designs begin emerging some companies fare better than others and thus we get big companies. Or alternatively existing big companies enter the industry. The end result anyway is that the competitive advantage shifts to process innovations as the big companies tend to be good at throwing resources at things and developing processes. Scale benefits and such then ensure that small companies either exit or gravitate toward non-mainstream niches.

But what if you lump these two things together? Technology cycles become shorter, thus meaning that the time window for big companies to reap benefits based on process innovations is shortened (I guess that product innovation cycles will also shorten, but I think the point is that to have relevant process innovation, you first need a product and the business, otherwise it's pointless). Will this, then, imply that big companies will be at an increasing disadvantage because of their inertia and inability to perform product innovations, at least on the level that start-ups can? And will this, then, imply that from an evolutionary perspective the days of the big companies are outnumbered?