Building a New Market System: Effective Action, Redirection and Generative Relationships

In this chapter, we describe some episodes in the early history of LonWorks, a technology for distributed control networks.1 LonWorks was introduced in December, 1990 by Echelon, a Silicon Valley start-up company. The launch generated considerable enthusiasm: the editor of one leading control engineering trade journal even predicted that LonWorks would do for control what the microprocessor did for computing. While that prediction still remains to be realized, LonWorks has found many applications in the past 18 years, and Echelon has enjoyed a steady if not spectacular growth over the same period. By end of LonWork’s first decade, over 3000 companies had purchased LonWorks development tools, and more than 5000 products incorporating LonWorks technology had been brought to market.