You can look into R&D expenditure or IT spending time series, univariate for one company or multivariate for whole bunch of firms.

Hi Murray,

The attached working paper and the SI material at http://bit.ly/mageeetalSIMay2014

give digital files for technological performance data. The  International Institute of Applied System Analysis has published extensively on diffusion and substitution and may be able to supply digital data if you contact them ( http://www.iiasa.ac.at)

Chris

Thank you, Christopher for those very good sources.

Hi Chris many thanks for that lead.

I will follow up.

I hope that the new year goes well.

Still interested in leads on aquiring access to historical times series data for technology diffusion and substitution, so if you know some one researching the that field an intro would be excellent. :)

Mant thanks

as a suggestion: patent data bases