<p>The fierce market competition leads firms that attempt to enter a market to carefully consider their timing of releasing a new product. As rivals to new entrants, incumbents need to continuously upgrade the technology level of their future products. However, extant studies have failed to reveal the interaction between an entrant’s decision regarding product release timing and an incumbent’s technology-upgrading strategy (reducing cost or improving quality). Therefore, our paper develops a duopolistic game model to address this issue and provides related managerial insights. Our paper shows that the incumbent’s different strategies could lead to the differentiated impact on the entrant’s timing decision for product release. While in certain condition, regardless of the incumbent’s technology upgrade plan, the entrant firm might not postpone product release even if he could produce with low cost in the future. Furthermore, an interesting result is that the incumbent can also benefit from the cost-reducing strategy even if the scale parameter for cost-reduction R&amp;D increases to be very large, i.e., the incumbent also obtains higher profit than that under quality- improving strategy. Finally, we extend a model where the entrant can engage in technological upgrade to compete against incumbent in future and find that adopting a technology upgrade strategy different with the incumbent firm is more likely to benefit the entrant.</p>