Predicting Technology

E. Vass Thomas

Description

Part of the theory about predicting the direction of technology in this book builds upon work done by Clayton Christensen, a professor of business at Harvard University. Christensen has written many books about how multinational corporations are affected by a topic called "disruptive technology."

Sujets

• Employabilité, métiers et formations
• Entrepreneurship

Informations

• Publié par: First Edition Design Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781622875511
• Langue: English

Extrait

Predicting Technology: A Practical Guide For Technology Managers and Marketing Professionals To Identify Future Market Opportunities
Thomas E. Vass


First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
Predicting Technology:

A Practical Guide For Technology Managers and Marketing Professionals To Identify Future Market Opportunities
Predicting Technology:
A Practical Guide For Technology Managers and Marketing Professionals To Identify Future Market Opportunities
Copyright ©2014 Thomas E. Vass

ISBN 978-1622-875-51-1 EBOOK

February 2014

Published and Distributed by
First Edition Design Publishing, Inc.
P.O. Box 20217, Sarasota, FL 34276-3217
www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com



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Introduction: Identifying New Market Opportunities

Part of the theory about predicting the direction of technology in this book builds upon work done by Clayton Christensen, a professor of business at Harvard University. Christensen has written many books about a topic called “disruptive technology.” Part of his work also includes the topic of how “sustaining innovations,” are different than disruptive technology.

All of his work, however, is directed to the area of how large multinational corporations handle the issue of technological innovation.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma , Christensen shows how technological innovations in products affects large corporations. He suggests that new products cut into the low end of the current marketplace and eventually evolve to the point where the new products displace high-end competitors and their reigning technologies.

Christensen’s main policy advice is directed to the senior managers at large corporations. He is primarily concerned with how large corporations with established products should respond to potentially disruptive technological innovation. Christensen writes that even the best-managed companies, in spite of their attention to customers and continual investment in new technology, are susceptible to failure no matter what the industry,

Christensen suggests that senior managers in large companies usually follow the conventional market wisdom that the “customer is always right.” The conventional wisdom leads managers to place too much attention on satisfying customers’ current needs. By focusing too much attention on current customers, the large companies fail to adapt or adopt new technology that will meet customers’ unstated or future needs.

When companies are blind-sided by the new competition, Christensen calls this phenomenon “disruptive technology.” Christensen’s thesis is that great companies blow it precisely because they do everything right. He explains why the large companies that had listened hard to customers and invested like crazy in new technologies still lost their market leadership when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure.

Part of the theory explained in this book is also about disruptive technology, but the focus of the theory is about smaller technology companies that are often the progenitors of disruptive product innovations

Christensen explains that most large companies miss “the next great wave.” Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. When the senior executives at large companies in a metro region, like Detroit, miss the next great wave, it is not just the companies that suffer. Thousands of ordinary workers suffer job loss and poor future financial prospects.

Part of the theory explained in this book is based upon a biological metaphor of how new species (products) evolve, that is applied to small technology firms that operate in a distinct economic region, which looks like an ecosystem.

It turns out that emerging product technologies often find their first applications in new or marginal regional markets, similar to how a new species originates at the extreme boundaries of a biological environment

To take advantage of innovation that results from the introduction of a new product, incumbent firms need to learn how to address a new market. Just like existing species need to learn how to compete with the new species.

In Christensen’s theories about disruptive technology, his focus is almost entirely on the role of cognitive failures in the senior team as the central explanatory construct. The senior managers somehow failed mentally to understand the threat from the new product.

If senior managers in large corporations had been more mentally competent in following organizational routines, they may have responded differently to the threat. Likewise, the theory explained in this book suggests that managers and executives of small technology companies in metro regions are sometimes incompetent and fail to react to threats to the local economic environment that arise from their allegiance to the market or local political status quo.

The biggest incompetence in large corporations, according to Christensen, comes from a mental allegiance to the status quo. In much of his work, he explains that large corporations and organizations customarily develop mind-sets and processes that revolve around doing what they already know. Once that pattern becomes established, managers have great difficulty justifying to others, or even themselves, the need to turn their processes upside down to respond to a barely emergent market change.

By the time the threat is apparent, however, it’s usually too late; upstart companies have seized a substantial lead. Often, the result for the larger firm that fails to adapt, to apply the biological evolutionary metaphor, is extinction.

In this book, regional economies look like environments. Inside the regional environment, there are many species who compete in what looks like networks or alliances. Sometimes the alliances cooperate for short-term advantage with each other, or, with species in other environments. Often, understanding how the regional networks operate will explain a lot about technological innovation and economic growth.

Each regional environment could be categorized by cultural and political values that are different than the cultural or political values in other regions. Some regional environments could be defined as having a creative culture. In one of his recent books, Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, Christensen and his co-authors argue that it is possible to predict which companies will win and which will lose in a specific situation.

This book makes a similar argument about predicting the direction of technology in regions. It also makes the same type of claim for small technology firms that Christensen makes about providing advice to senior managers of large corporations about what to do when the managers of small firms figure out what is going to happen next.

This book directs its advice to mid-level managers and senior executives of small technology firms, usually those with top line revenues over $1 million, and generally with more than 5 employees.

The advice given in this book about how to predict the direction of technology is also valuable for marketing professionals and business professional advisors, such as securities attorneys and CPAs, who give advice to small companies.

The book addresses the following issues:

What promotes regional knowledge creation?

Knowledge creation is one of the most important variables in understanding the direction of the technology in the economy. Understanding where knowledge is created, and then watching how new knowledge diffuses in a local economy, provides the basis to understand the direction of technology.

Sarah J. Marsh and Gregory N. Stock, in their article, Creating Dynamic Capability: The Role of Intertemporal Integration, Knowledge Retention, and Interpretation, describe how difficult it is for any single corporation to acquire external knowledge, that originates outside the company, or even to understand and codify prior internal corporate knowledge.

“Uncertainty about the ability for technological knowledge to be transformed to meet market demands, lack of complementary technologies, the lack of developed markets for a given technical feature, and other types of uncertainty add significant challenges to organizations as they develop products for future markets,” they state.

How Do Small Technology Firms In a Metro Region Create and Diffuse Technological Knowledge ?

As Marsh and Stock point out, “Suppliers, customers, consultants, and the results of benchmarking and reverse engineering all provide sources of external knowledge that ma