به سوی یک مدل احتمالی از مدیریت فناوری

The foundation of this paper is a discussion of how different traditions and approaches to Management of Technology (MoT) at the company level can be divided into schools of thought based on a rich view of the environmental challenges facing companies today. Obviously, contingency factors should be related to empirical challenges of firms, thereby enabling technology managers to apply MoT theory pragmatically. It is argued that the existing mappings of MoT theory are, indeed, not sufficiently related to empirical contingency factors. Thus, the main purpose of the paper is to discuss such empirical contingency factors that could be applied to MoT theory and make it more useful for technology managers in practice. The well-known distinction between technology exploitation and disruptive technological change is discussed and dismissed as too simplistic. Instead, three situations for technology management are formulated and briefly related to the MoT theory to round up the paper. The latter forms the main contribution of the paper.

The theme of this paper — Management of Technology (MoT) in a changing environment — could hardly be more timely or relevant. Changing conditions have increasingly become an inevitable and inseparable part of every day life, of world economics and politics and of the present state of the natural environment. Further, most changes (social, economical, environmental, etc.) are directly caused by and/or related to the development, perception and use of technology. Key traits of the technologically related changes are that they tend to transgress physical, organisational as well as disciplinary boundaries. The notions of the technological life-cycle (Bhalla, 1987) and its relationship to the creative destruction of industries and individual firms (Freeman, 1982) are well-known parts of the foundation of MoT theory. Their implications, most notably the strong links between technological innovation and organisational change (Voss, 1988) and the implied normative statements that organisational change theory should — and could — be based on technological changes in the environment of firms (Hurst, 1995) are more recent, but no less well known. In the recent years, the fast and turbulent changes related to Information Technology has served to emphasise these notions even further and open the eyes of many to the fact that MoT should be a substantial part of managing a firm. Also there is a market-pull from the forces of the so-called new economy which is partly based on the decreasing life cycles of products and technologies, the emergence of new information technologies, as well as a number of other notions from management and organisational theory. Some speak of a new economy where competitive advantage will be based on knowledge workers and new organisational forms, like flexible networks, and management. Nonetheless, the market-pull does little to diminish the relevance of MoT in firms, as the coming organisational forms will be based firmly on inventions in information technology and other technological fields. In light of this relevance, it is reassuring to know that an ever increasing body of knowledge regarding management of technology is being developed by an active scientific community. However, the discipline of MoT is characterised by a vast number of contributions emerging in a divergent manner rather than a convergent one (Drejer, 1996 and Drejer, 1997). The number of publications related to MoT — depending on search engine used — can easily amount to 25 000+ these days, yet there are almost as many definitions of key terms of MoT — e.g. technology and management — as there are authors within the field (Drejer, 2001). This points towards the need for a contingent model of MoT theory for technology managers to access the theory easily which is the subject of this paper. In the next section, we will establish that the traditional approach to contingency thinking about management theory is too simplistic to be of practical use, when it comes to MoT. This will be followed by a discussion about what can be learned from the traditional technological S-curve for technological life cycles and, further, a look at some new empirical and theoretical evidence. This leads to the formulation of three different situations for MoT and, thus, a richer view of the contingent environmental factors that should guide the choice of MoT theory in practice.