تبدیل آموزش مدیریت فناوری: ارزش ایجاد یادگیری در اوایل قرن بیست و یکم

Management education is often criticized as irrelevant, out of touch, too “trade-school,” too interested in training financial services professionals and consultants, and insufficiently focused on innovation, the major driver of the economy. Technology management (TM) education has always focused on practical and relevant issues and innovation has been a major theme. We believe however that rapid changes in the global environment of business demand changes in the underlying assumptions of TM. Starting with a brief overview of the field, this paper examines the major environmental changes that must be addressed by TM and the skills that future graduates will require.

The discipline of Technology Management (TM)2 is relevant in any organization with a sizeable investment in technology. The focus of this essay is TM education, which is clearly important, especially, but by no means only, in advanced economies where efficiency and low cost can no longer provide sufficient competitive advantage. Instead, the creation of new or improved value is a key, perhaps the key, engine for progress and economic health. We see TM as the discipline to which all technology-intensive firms (almost all firms these days) must turn when they seek new talent. The complexity and breadth of TM are reflected in the diverse ways that TM is defined, as shown in Table 1. As seen in these definitions, TM's overarching concern is to help management understand, assimilate, integrate and direct technology and technology-facilitated innovation for the benefit of the enterprise and customers. In other words, TM's ultimate objective is to enhance competencies for creating or improving products, processes or services in the marketplace. Key components of TM (such as information management, innovation management, entrepreneurship, new product development, intellectual property, etc.) are increasingly recognized as essential for continued corporate and societal well-being (Atkinson and Correa, 2007). How technology is managed will determine our future well-being in critical ways. Thus, TM education is critical. But for TM education to play its full and rightful role, there is a need for a re-examination to make sure that our research and educational efforts are au courant, relevant and engaged with the important management concerns for today and the next decade or so. In particular, TM education needs to adjust to an increasingly complex interconnected global system, a world-wide scarcity of resources, demographic trends, the advent of new technologies, the rise of increasingly knowledge-intensive innovation, the broadening sources and shifting “geography” of innovation, and the emergence of new types of professionals engaged in TM. We believe strongly that TM education must use emerging computing and communications technologies – ranging from games and simulations to instant messaging, podcasts, blogs and social networks among others – to deliver its knowledge. Likewise, in a global economy where important problems require interdisciplinary approaches, TM education must embrace program arrangements such as joint and dual degrees that cross traditional academic and international boundaries. However, in this essay, we focus on the content of TM curricula and the desirable attributes of graduates rather than pedagogy or program configuration. This approach helps limit the scope of the essay and emphasizes the subject matter of TM as its distinct competence and competitive advantage viz.-a-viz. other management disciplines. In this spirit, aiming more to initiate a dialog than to provide definitive answers, this essay hopefully offers a fresh and overarching viewpoint regarding the major parameters that define modern TM education. After presenting a short appraisal of the current state of TM, we proceed to discuss global challenges that lead us to new perspectives and to speculate on the desirable capabilities of future TM graduates.

The implications for TM education of major developments in the TM field discussed above are quite startling. While maintaining the best and most relevant from the past and present, there is a great and urgent need to devise new programs and to experiment with a variety of approaches. This is essential if TM education is to meet emerging technical, social, economic and political challenges and to play a leadership role in the future economy. The shifts needed in TM education include the following: • New disciplinary fields should supplement traditional TM educational offerings, e.g., service management, data analytics, social networks, global innovation, knowledge management, etc. • TM must be seen and taught as an increasingly distributed task with key nodes scattered across the globe – as both sources of innovation and as markets for high value creation products and services. • TM education should help students tap into a globally dispersed open source world, in which users, individuals, groups or even “crowds” are the creators of modern innovative products and services. • The concept of “management” in the classical sense of controlling a single organization should be enlarged to embrace the new reality of managing internally as well as collaborating externally in a global network of customers and peer organizations. Instead, of a decision-making and rather top-down approach to management, a more “ecological” perspective is needed for modern TM. In developing our value-added educational approach, we have argued that TM programs should consider more than just the subject matter and pedagogy of their curricula. They should also consider the roles of their graduates as managers, analytics, innovators or integrators. We conclude by comparing our critique and prescriptions for TM education with some recent discussions of MBA programs. Mintzberg (2004) and Bennis and O’Toole (2005) posit a gap between the academic, “ivory tower” nature of an MBA education and the problem solving skills needed by practitioners. Pfeffer and Fong (2004) link the instrumentalist, financial orientation of an MBA education with ethical disasters and the erosion of public trust in business managers. While TM as an educational institution is not exempt from similar criticisms, it seems to us to be more practice-oriented almost by definition. Instead, our concerns with TM education rest with its ability to prepare graduates to excel in a technology-driven, rapidly changing world of global competition. With respect to prescriptions for improving the educational process, some critics point to the need for “professionalization” of MBA education to emulate the close alignment of academic research and practice that exists in schools of law and medicine. Others, as we have pointed out at various places in this essay, suggest different approaches to the development of valuable human capital through the MBA educational process. Datar et al. (2010), among other things, urge business schools to improve their teaching of thinking, reasoning and creative problem-solving skills and to focus more attention on issues of accountability, ethics and social responsibility. Their book provides detailed case studies of the approaches taken by leading business schools to revitalize their MBA programs – primarily by focusing more attention on life-long learning skills. Our prescription for TM education similarly suggests that the capabilities of TM graduates are the primary source of value of TM programs to industry and society. We further propose that the designers of TM programs recognize four general classes of students in the technology arena: managers, analytics, entrepreneurs and integrators. The programs can then offer different educational experiences for those classes of student that they choose to serve. Finally, we believe that future success will depend heavily on our ability to develop integrators – persons who are able to think and act effectively in a technology-driven, interconnected and complex global environment.