Technological know-how is necessary to make effectively use of new machinery

and capital goods. Firms and employees accumulate technology-specific

knowledge when working with specific machinery. Radical innovation differs

by technology type and pre-existing knowledge may be imperfectly transferable

across types. In this paper, I address the implications of cross-technology

transferability of skills for firm-level technology adoption and its consequences

for the direction of macroeconomic technological change. I propose a microeconomically

founded model of technological learning that is based on

empirical and theoretical insights of the innovation literature. In a simulation

study using the macroeconomic ABM Eurace@unibi-eco and applied to the

context of green technology diffusion, it is shown that a high transferability of

knowledge has ambiguous effects. It accelerates the diffusion process initially,

but comes of the cost of technological stability and specialization in the

long run. For firms, it is easy to adopt, but also easy to switch back to

the conventional technology type. It is shown how different types of policies

can be used to stabilize a technological transition pathway. The findings are

summarized in a general taxonomic framework to characterize technologies.

It represents a bottom-up approach to the study of technology transitions.