Technology management is a process, which includes planning, directing, control and coordination of the development and implementation of technological capabilities to shape and accomplish the strategic and operational objectives of an organization. This paper surveys technology management (TM) development using a literature review and classification of articles from 1995 to 2003 with keyword index in order to explore how TM methodologies and applications have developed in this period. Based on the scope of 546 articles of technology management methodologies, this paper surveys and classifies TM methodologies using the eight categories of: TM framework, General and policy research, Information systems, Information and communication technology, Artificial intelligence/expert systems, Database technology, Modeling, and Statistics methodology, together with their applications for different research and problem domains. Discussion is presented indicating future development for technology management methodologies and applications as follows: (1) TM methodologies tend to develop towards expert orientation, and TM applications development is a problem-oriented domain. (2) Integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, and integration of TM technologies studies may broaden our horizons on this subject. (3) The ability to continually change and obtain new understanding is the power of TM methodologies and will be the subject of future work.
Technology management is a process, which includes planning, directing, control and coordination of the development and implementation of technological capabilities to shape and accomplish the strategic and operational objectives of an organization (Task Force on Management of Technology, 1987). On the other hand, technology management includes: (1) planning for the development of technology capabilities; (2) identifying key technology and its related fields for development; (3) determining whether ‘to buy’ or ‘to make’, i.e. whether importation or self-development should be pursued; and (4) establishing institutional mechanisms for directing and coordinating the development of technology capabilities, and the design of policy measures for controls (Wang, 1993). Clearly, technology management should not only fulfill the management needs of a specific set of technologies within a domain and inter-domain relationship, but it should also develop the implementation strategies according to the available resources, current technologies, future markets, and socio-economic environment (Linn et al., 2000). Therefore, how to manage technology has become an important issue in the past few decades, and the technology management (TM) community has developed a wide range of methodologies and applications for both academic research and practical applications. In addition, TM has attracted much effort to explore its nature, concepts, frameworks, architectures, theories, systems, models, tools, functions, and real world implementations in order to demonstrate TM methodologies and their applications.
As a part of TM research, this paper focuses on surveying technology management development through a literature review and classification of articles from 1995 to 2002 in order to explore the TM methodologies and applications from that period. The reason for choosing this period is that the Internet was opened to general users in 1994 and this new era of information and communication technology has played an important role not only in electronic commerce, but also in technology management. The literature survey is based on a search for the keyword index ‘technology management’ on the Elsevier SDOS online database, from which 9253 articles were found on 31 July 2003. After topic filtering, there were 1626 articles related to the keyword ‘technology management application’ and 546 of these were connected to the keyword ‘technology management methodology’. Based on the scope of 546 articles on technology management methodology, this paper surveys and classifies TM methodologies using eight categories: TM framework, General and policy research, Information systems, Information and communication technology, Artificial intelligence/expert systems, Database technology, Modeling, and Statistics methodology, together with their applications on different research and problem domains.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, present the survey results of TM methodologies and applications based on the above eight categories. Section 10 presents discussion, with suggestions for future development of technology methodologies and applications. Finally, Section 11 contains a brief conclusion.
This paper is based on a literature review on technology management methodologies and applications from 1995 to 2003 using a keyword index search. We conclude that TM methodologies tend to develop towards expert orientation, and TM applications development is a problem-oriented domain. Different science methodologies are suggested to be implemented in TM. Integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, and integration of TM methodologies studies may broaden our horizon on this subject. Finally, the ability to continually change and obtain new understandings is the power of TM technologies, and will be the topic of future work.
