Chapter 5: Technology Management

Introduction

In many industries, companies are trying hard to catch up with developments in manufacturing and services in order to compete with the other organizations. Development departments and centers, technology transfer offices, university technology centers and research parks in technological industries have contributed a lot to this completion. Organizations have met with the new concepts like “technological innovation”, “innovation management”, “technology forecasting”, “entrepreneurship”, “knowledge management”, “strategy of technology” by the help of scientist. The direct and indirect usage of technology provides a growth for organizations to compete strategically.

Concepts of Technology and Technology Management

In order to increase their technical capacities, skills and capabilities of workers and to decrease production times effectively, organizations are trying hard to integrate their own technologies with the new ones. To achieve this, Technology Management, which is a combination of multidisciplinary approaches, needs to be discussed. When doing this, there are two key questions to be asked; what is technology/ how is it perceived and how can technology be discussed under management context?

The use of technology helps and supports the organizations by:

• Adding economic value to organizations.
• Organizations’ gaining competitive advantage.
• Improving the production of the existing goods
• Improving new products, services and innovations
• Improving the relations among customers and organizations

Technology management in organizations is important, especially in organizations that are producing technological products and services to compete in local and global areas. That’s why some concepts like technology and technology management, processes of technology management and technology management tools should be discussed.

Technology

Technology is “the information necessary to achieve a certain production outcome from a particular means of combining or processing selected inputs which include production processes, intra-firm organizational structures, management techniques, and means of finance, marketing methods or any of its combination”. It also includes the concepts like information, production, process, inputs and outputs, organizations and techniques.

In order to assess technology, we need to consider the physical objects consisting of hardware such as hardware, devices and tools and the knowledge of crafting, processes and developments for using the hardware and other physical tools.

Technology Management

Technology Management, which is combined with the engineering, management, information technologies, is defined as a process for planning and controlling the necessary technologies to shape and realize the strategic and functional goals of the organizations.

There are several effects of the integration of organizational strategies with the technology management on organizations like the expectation of creating and strengthening competitive advantage of organizations with the whole processes of technology management.

The main subjects of technology management are

• Human Resources Management
• Strategies and Politics
• Product or Service Development
• Marketing, organizations and program management
• Transferring of technology
• Corporations among universities and industries
• Organizational structures and procedures
• Planning and controlling, mathematical and statistical modeling
• Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship, International Entrepreneurship
• Supply chain management

Technology management has also quite close relationship with Business Management, Knowledge Management, Innovation Management and R&D (research and development) Management.

Technology Management Processes and Activities

Technology covers all concepts of technological knowledge, development of new and existing products and services which are supported by competences and capabilities of the organization.

The process model introduced by Gregory helps to explain the whole understanding of the sub-processes and key aspects of technology management. This model includes 5 basic activities for integrating business activities with business processes as new product improvement, strategy development and general management of the organization.

Technology identification is the initial sub-process, including the identification of existing technologies and new technologies for products and services and the processes within an organization. The general aim of this sub-process is to determine the possible benefits of technologies that might be important for organizations and to reduce the environmental uncertainty. In an organizational context, identification can also be explained as finding out the needs of the technology for a part of an organization or the whole organization. The types of technology identified by the organizations are;

• Base Technologies (the common technologies used by the organizations and its competitors).
• Critical Technologies (the technologies that can be seen as the most important technologies for an organization).
• Pacing Technologies (technologies that can cause several changes during the current production technologies of products and services and similar activities)
• Emerging Technologies (technologies that have the ability of changing the current processes of organizations)

Selection process is about giving decisions for using appropriate technologies from the alternatives. To select the right technology among the alternatives multi criteria decision making models can be used by the specialist, engineers or technology managers.

Two main selection decisions can be made in organizations. One of them is the “make or buy decision” (also called the outsourcing decision). The other decision is the “keep or sell” decision, which is about the technology production of the organizations if they are going to use it in their own organization or sell this technology to other organizations to maximize the profit.

Acquisition is another decision process like selection of the technologies, which involves a number of individuals from almost every department of the organization. There are five stages for technology acquisition;

• Establishing market-place requirements
• Identifying technology solutions
• Classifying technology solutions
• Assessing sources of technology acquisition
• Making the technology decision.

Developing the technological capabilities, increasing strategic options, gaining efficiency improvements for reducing costs and increasing customers’ interests and responding to the competitive environment are some of the reasons why organizations acquire technology. They do it in two ways: either by external acquisition (from other organizations or industries) or internal acquisition (the R&D activities inside the organization).

Technology exploitation refers to the utilization of technologies to improve organizational performances of products, services and processes. Organizations may exploit the technology internally (the “in house application of technological knowledge in firm’s own products) or externally (an organizational strategy to develop dynamic capabilities to transfer technology) or both. To realize this there are five steps; Planning, Intelligence, Negotiation, Realization, and Control.

Protection is a process and a set of activities to protect the knowledge, skills, technologies and brands of organizations. Patent, licensing activities and copyrights can be evaluated as protection activities.

Technology can be protected by the instruments like; Patents (legal right to exclude other organizations given by the government), Trademarks (Word, name, symbol, etc.), Copyrights (Protection of literary work, musical work, dramatic work, sound recordings), Trade Secrets (Protecting the internal secret information) and Know-How (Contractual transfer of knowledge from experts).

Technology Management Tools

To manage technology and its activities there may be need for tools that may help organizations to manage technology more effectively. Some of the technology management methods are:

• Technology Management Framework
• Information Systems and Technology Management
• Information and Communication Systems
• Artificial Intelligence/ Expert Systems
• Database technology
• Modeling
• Multivariate Statistical Techniques

These technology management tools may help organizations and create a significant value by integrating them into organizational technology management processes.

General Evaluation About Technology Management

When we consider the dynamics of technology management and the implementation and the complexity of the environment, internal management may require organizations to hire highly skilled managers or workers to identify problems and find creative solutions for dealing with them about the ongoing processes. For the organizational performance, we should also take in consideration cost of innovations or new product developments. Research and development and commercialization issues may also affect the organizational performance.