CT060-3-3-EMTECH

TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 1

 TOPIC LEARNING OUTCOMES
At the end of this topic, you should be able to:
1. Explaining the Technology Assessment Process.
2. Explaining Risk Profiling.
3. Explain Strategy making in uncertain environments
4. Discuss the art of strategy making
5. Explain the twin pillars of Strategy

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 2

 Key Terminologies

• Technology Assessment Process. • Strategy

• Scoping. • Environment
• Searching. • Uncertainty
• Evaluating. • Discipline
• Committing. • Imagination

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 3

 Origin of New Technologies

• New technologies undergo period of evolution and revolution (speciation in technology)

• Technological development and transfer of technology to new domains of application
• Created through convergence of fusion
• Revolution – process of shifting application domains and rapid subsequent growth in
the new domain

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 4

 Technology Assessment Process
• There are FOUR interrelated steps to the technology assessment process:

Scoping Searching Evaluating Committin

g

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 5

 Scoping (Strategic Intent)

• The scope of the technology assessment must be clearly established.

• Where the firm looks for technology depends upon what is it looking for.
• Assessed by firm’s strategic intent and core capabilities.
• Defining the target market.
• Potential threat or opportunity from the technology.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 6

 Scoping (Strategic Intent)

• “If you don’t have a target, you’ll miss it every time.”

• The scope of the technology assessment must be clearly limited.
• Where the firm looks for technologies depends upon what it is looking for.
• Will be shaped by firm’s strategic intent & capabilities.
• Technology assessment is only meaningful when performed in the context of the firm’s
strategic intent.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 7

 Scoping (Strategic Intent)

• Strategic intent is a “sense of direction, discovery, or destiny.”

– British Airway’s goal of becoming “The World’s Favorite Airline”
– Meet this year’s goal of launching a new $200 million business unit.
– Increase product shelf life.
– Lower production costs.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 8

 Scoping (Strategic Intent)

• Technology cannot be considered in the abstract.

– It should be used to answer a question or to address the challenge.

• The strategic intent of the company is this challenge.

• If the company is going after a new market or seeking a new level of performance, what
technology will take it there?
• Example:
– What new information systems could help British Airways become the world’s favorite airline?

• The firm’s strategic intent must be foremost in focus for the technology assessment team.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 9

 Scoping (Firm Capabilities)

• Core competence could be:

– Special technical capabilities leading to the development of unique products.
– Ability to provide superior services.
– Capabilities for rapid product innovation and development.
– Particular capabilities which yield enduring costs advantages.

• First-rate technology assessment can itself be a crucial core competence in today’s

economy.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 10

 Scoping (Firm Capabilities)

• Codifying the firm’s technical capabilities is the starting point for the technology
assessment.
• The key questions:
– Does the firm possess sufficient capabilities?
– Will it have to acquire, develop or create partnerships to attain specific capabilities for tech
development and commercialization?
– NOTE: This may also require divesting some existing capabilities.

• Managing a creative technology process requires balancing the capabilities &

constraints of the firm with its intellectual openness to new technologies &
ambitions for growth.
CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 11
 Searching

• Determine the information and technology sources that needs to be consistently reviewed
for signs of technology changes.
• Procedures to follow, and the organizational arrangement that will follow it to screen the
technologies.
• Search for signals of both emergent technology and its commercial viability.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 12

 Searching
(Sensing Technological Emergence)

• How can the technology manager detect the signal of a potentially transformative
discovery?
• The challenge is to recognize some momentum beginning to form around a given
technology.
– Leading technologies can be recognized as emergent for their technological “following”.

• Technology forecasting occurs by looking carefully into the recent past for signals
of a momentum building behind a technology toward filling a market need.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 13

 Searching
(Strong Signals)

• These clearly reveal commercial investment in the candidate technology and

signal its technical feasibility to serve target market needs.
• Two examples:
– Patent & littérature citations.
– Competitor’s actions.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 14

 Searching
(Weak Signals)

• A more subtle indicators that a scientific discovery has commercial potential, and
that independent analysis has recognized this potential – and a following has then
formed.
– Examples include:
• Confirmation within the knowledge networks.
• Competitive intelligence.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 15

 Searching
(Knowledge & Information Capture)
• As the picture becomes more complex, the company needs a system for keeping
track of all the information & progress along the various research streams.
• WHY?
– Information gathered at the start may only be understood fully later on.
– Technologies continue to progress & develop.
– As the team grows or changes, compiled information can rapidly bring team members up-to-date.
– Knowledge of the team and its rationale for selecting decisions should be explicitly described to
monitor progress and earn support from the firm leadership for new initiatives.
– The role of the internet & corporate intranets creates extraordinary opportunities.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 16

 Evaluating

• Sorting through the set of possibilities that has been defined.

• Managers need to rank candidate technologies based on common set of financial &
organizational criteria.
• Technology positioning on ranking can be achieved by weighting scores of these
different criteria’s:
– Financial analysis.
– Measures of risks.

• Drafted the financial, competitive and organizational impacts of the new

technologies analyzed (Figure 4.2)
CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 17
 Evaluating
(Risk Profiling)

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 18

 Evaluating

• It is important to limit the technology choices & important to preserve a record of

those technologies that does not make the grade for future possible breakthrough.
• To assess technologies in the context of corporate strategy, managers can develop
technology plans that approximate the paths to:
– Technology commercialization
– Required investment.
– Organizational implications.
– Potential financial rewards.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 19

 Evaluating

• A draft plan will reveal the outstanding questions that must be answered to reduce
the uncertainties.
• An effective plan describes the technical & market uncertainties and the timing of
investments & steps toward resolving each area of uncertainty.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 20

 Committing

• Four general forms of strategic commitment reflect four increasingly aggressive

strategic postures or intention.
• These depends upon the:
– Competitive imperative to take action.
– Risk reward relationship of the technology & its market.
– Signals of technology emergence of the new technology

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 21

 Committing

Watch & Wait Position & Learn

Committing
Sense & Follow Believe & Lead

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 22

 Strategy Making – Planning under uncertainty

• Needs to be rethought in an environment of rapid change

• High uncertainty characteristic
• Market demands new solutions to new problems
• Mechanical planning no longer works
• Adjust strategies quickly and creates new ones continually.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 23

 Art of Strategy Making

“Strategy is an Art, not a Science”.

“Strategy can be thought of as a theory of success that has not yet been tested.”

Theory of business:
“A set of assumptions about markets, technology, and it’s
dynamics, about a company’s strength and weaknesses,
and about what the company gets paid for. “
– Peter Drucker

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 24

 Art of Strategy Making

• Strategist must choose one among many competing strategies for the
actual test.
• Cannot validate all possible strategies by implementing each one of
them.
• No amount of planning can guarantee success but can improve odd
of success.
• Past successful approaches are an option for the future

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 25

 Two Pillars of Strategy

Discipline
&
Imagination

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 26

 Discipline – What is it?

“Consistent application of rules to evaluate a set of alternatives”.

‘Rational Actor Model’ – the actor or strategist makes a choice by collecting
information, developing alternatives, and selecting the one that “maximizes
value”.

Discipline can be achieved by:

• identifying the patterns in the evolution of the market
• Compare these trends to similar markets

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 27

 Discipline – Benefits & Limitations
• The followings reflects the benefits & limitations of Discipline as the pillar of
strategy making:
Benefits Limitations
Linked to greater consensus among top managers Analysis rather than synthesis
A way for managers to be more judicious in their decision Selection at the expense of generation
making.
To identify and correct ‘avoidable errors’. Extrapolation from the past
More exhaustive or inclusive process for making and
Overconfidence in the power of analysis
integrating strategic decisions.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 28

 Imagination - What is it?

• Associated concepts of synthesis, vision, foresight, creativity, and

intuition.
• A deliberate effort to generate and evaluate more options for higher
chance of success.
• ‘deliberate diversity’ in the way problems are defined and alternate
solutions are generated and selected.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 29

 Imagination - The Process
• Alternatives must be varied and distinct rather than mere variations on the same theme.
• Use multiple cognitive frames to examine and define the problem.
• Diversity in the number of rules used select among alternatives.
• ‘Future-oriented’ to imagine the direction of the company and work backward from that
future.
• Maintain a portfolio of options - “launching pads” to quickly adapt and change direction.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 30

 Imagination – Benefits & Limitations
• The followings reflects the benefits & limitations of Imagination as the pillar of
strategy making:
Benefits Limitations
• Adaptive thinking and • Chaos.
persistent emphasis on • Losing touch with reality.
creatively “thinking out-of-the- • Undervaluing the past.
box”. • Diluting individual creativity.
• Abandon the “hierarchy of
• Slowing the process.
experience” in favor of
hierarchy of imagination”.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 31

 Disciplined Imagination
• Combination rather than extreme emphasis on either
• Capitalize on the strength while avoiding their weaknesses.
• Imagination generates diverse options and encourages creative thinking.
Discipline grounds the process in realty- evaluated, developed and implemented.

“Movies are a make believe business that feeds on imagination. When you
are creating them, you are in the fantasy world. Without some kind of
discipline, however, it is too easy to get distracted”.
– George Lucas
CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 32
 Practicing Disciplined Imagination

• Generate imaginative options • Must take a more complex route

• Evaluate the options • Dismount the formal present system

consistently. • Build a new process from scratch, create

• Periods of idea generation using new space, new rules, new lenses, and

imagination and periods of challenge the orthodoxies.

disciplined idea evaluation.

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 33

 Conclusions
• Rigorous and iterative process for assessing technologies is crucial.
• Mistakes have tremendously expensive strategic and financial consequences.
• High level of uncertainties in the technology assessment.
• Strategy making can be an art.
• Disciplined imagination is a common feature of the process by which artists,
scientist, theorists, and strategists venture into the unknown.
• Develop both capabilities but need not deploy them simultaneously.
• Successful strategist in emerging technologies will find their way to develop and
sustain disciplined imagination

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 34

 Summary / Recap of Main Points

• As a summary, these are the areas covered:

– 1. Explaining the Technology Assessment Process.
– 2. Explaining Risk Profiling.
– 3. Explain Strategy making in uncertain environments
– 4. Discuss the art of strategy making
– 5. Explain the twin pillars of Strategy

CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 35

 Question & Answer Session

Q&
A
CT060-3-3-EMTECH Chapter 7 – Technology Assessment SLIDE 36