Technology Management – The CTM Perspective
Background:
The purpose of this note is to outline the Cambridge University Centre for Technology Management (CTM) view of technology management so that comparison can be made with the research and teaching portfolios of other centres. In parallel we are attempting to develop the ‘big picture/world view’ of technology management in order to show how the various perspectives on this subject may be related to each other.
CTM Research Overview:
Our research in the area of technology management originated from several starting positions. These included our history of taking a process view of strategic issues, new product introduction / innovation research and make or buy (technology selection) decision making. The continued growth and development from these core themes has shaped our view of the domain of technology management. Figure 1 shows past, current and proposed research projects linked to the key themes that now appear to underpin our research portfolio:
- Management and business processes
- Innovation and change
- Industry and technology evolution
Gregory’s early paper ‘Technology management: a process approach’ applied process thinking to technology management. The five-process model (Fig. 2) aims to provide a comprehensive view of the activities that are involved in technology management in a manufacturing business. Extensive research and practical application has resulted in a number of enhancements to this framework:
- The processes can be interpreted at different levels within a manufacturing organisation (e.g. strategic or operational).
- The framework integrates functions within a manufacturing business (e.g. research, manufacturing, marketing).
- Links can be made to other conceptual business views (e.g. the resource-based view via the technologies, systems and process models for strategy and new product development).
Our other main areas of research can be derived from this overarching process framework. For example make or buy issues are strongly linked to selection and acquisition processes, and new product introduction is largely concerned with technology exploitation.
However there are some limitations with this framework in terms of its linkage to the outside world and the explicit representation of human aspects of business, existing models of technology management, innovation and strategy.
Individual Cambridge research projects have developed their own frameworks to conceptualise the necessary subset of technology management issues. For example current work in make or buy decision making has resulted in the framework shown in Fig. 3 in order to link the relevant factors into a decision making methodology.
Other principal characteristics of our work are the manufacturing business focus (the unit of analysis is usually the firm or a subset of the firm) and the emphasis on practical outputs from the research, often in the form of a decision making methodology.
Current work is focusing on linking technology resources to the business objectives of the company. We are developing tools to facilitate this, and formulating an associated framework to visualise their integration and links to business theory. The particular aspect of technology management under review is technology planning and one related tool is technology roadmapping (Fig. 4a). The accompanying framework (Fig. 4b) is derived from the route map format and shows market, product and technology levels in the business against a time axis.
Although no single integrating picture of manufacturing business has yet been found which satisfactorily integrates all the above, we have derived a picture which is perhaps more a business model (Fig. 5). This was developed to support the Manufacturing Leaders’ Programme, and links resources and processes in the firm to systems and supply chain. This visualisation is more of a systems view of manufacturing business, and has been used to underpin a manufacturing business audit and to show the relationship between the main taught subjects of the Programme. It may provide a useful starting point for the technology management framework as systems theory is all-encompassing in its scope.
The Big Picture:
We have yet to draw the composite ‘big picture’ for technology management, but we think it will incorporate features of the frameworks described above. It may be useful to identify some of the requirements of this framework as a precursor to its derivation. It should:
- Show the current context and resources of the business together with the processes that link them.
- Be interpretable at different levels and by different functions within the business.
- Show explicitly, or indicate the connection to, the other principal conceptual frameworks and theories of business, in particular:
-The resource-based view
-The competitive forces (strategic management) view
-The systems view of manufacturing business
-Innovation and knowledge management
The innovation 'funnel' concept provides a possible basis for linking technology management to new product development and innovation, in the business context, and has potential for forming the basis of a practical and academically robust framework (Fig. 6). This framework has interesting parallels to the technology roadmap and planning framework presented in Fig. 4.
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