TIM Flashcards
Explain the different factors that influence the firm
Industry
Political and economic
General societal (consumer)
Technology trends
Describe how industries evolve
- Era of ferment/Disruption
- Dominant design emerges
- Incremental innovation
- modularisation: specialist parts, innovation at part level, efficiency gain
- complementary assets dominate: brand image, market info, distribution, manufacturing
- Maturity
What is meant by a technology ‘S-curve’?
The S curve is a curve with technology performance over time with four phases:
- Emerging: early research, emerging in other industries, competitive impact unclear but positive
- Pacing: potential gamechanger, not yet in product, competitive impact likely to be high
- Key: in use in product, basis of competitive differentiation, high competitive impact
- Base: essential to business, widespread, little competitive impact
The S curve usually includes and depicts a technology generation shift depicted by a second s curve, sometimes illustrated as a discontinuity.
Examples of S curves:
- photographic technologies, film vs pixel. Performance factor is image quality.
What is the difference between sustaining and disruptive technologies?
Sustaining:
- Improving performance of existing products with reference to current customers’ performance measures
Disruptive:
- Product performance may be initially worse but presents new value proposition
What are the attributes that enable product’s to be easily analysed?
- Relative advantage: over existing offerings
- Observability
- Trialability: experiment without switching costs
- Compatibility: with current conditions
- Complexity
Describe what is meant by a consumer adoption curve.
A curve with either the rate of adoption out of 100% or the market share over time with five adopter types:
- innovators/techies
- early adopters/visionaries
- early majority/pragmatists
- late majority/conservatives
- laggards/sceptics
Evolution of adoption curve and markets is unpredictable as supply and demand do not move in synch.
- Supply:
- improvement of competing technology is unpredictable
- new business models reach users in unexpected ways
- technology standard wars can be engaged in unpreditable ways
- supply needs investment which may not come in times of uncertainty
- Demand:
- Feedback loops between users influencing each other`s choices are unpredictable
- Demand for interactive products are especially unpredictable because of network effects
- Users may face switching and learning costs
- Demographics lead to surprises
What is the ISAEP framework? Give examples
It is a technology management process framework:
- Identification
- Read journals, Internal research, Work with universities, Patent searching, Lead users
- GE open innovation
- Selection
- Stage gates, PESTEL, Ansoff matrix , Cost benefit analysis, TRL analysis, Pareto and Porters
- Technology roadmaps (BAESystems, BP), Innovation ‘outposts’ (Amazon), ‘Open’ campus approach (Unilever)
- Acquisition
- M&A, Reverse engineering, R&D, Recruitment, Joint ventures
- Be helpful (comet and boeing), Get the person, Run a competition
- Exploitation
- Licensing, Servitisation, Pricing strategy, Branding, Platform efforts, Sell IP
- Domino, Facebook
- Protection
- IP, Barriers to entry, Secret, NDAs, First mover advantage, Predatory pricing
Explain the innovation funnel
- Ideas (risks and experiments)
- Selection and prioritisation
- Implementation (discipline and quality)
Explain the different project management models
Serial waterfall
- Objectives
- Scope (what)
- Responsibility matrix (who does what)
- Work and resource plan (how)
- Schedule, budget, resources (when, how much, where)
Agile project management:
- Determine objectives, alternatives and constraints
- Identify and resolve risks
- Evaluate alternatives
- Develop deliverables
- Plan next iteration
Scrum:
- No work plan/critical path
- Meet everyday
- Share tasks
- ideal for software upgrades and investigations
Explain the product creation process
- Define/refine the project
- clear aims (elevator pitch into full specification)
- understand tradeoffs (quality, cost, time)
- Define risks and experiments
- create risk register
- main risks may not be the product
- Manage the performance engine
- New products require changes throughout the company
- Cross functional teams not partnerships
- Manage the process
- stage gates
- quality control
How to construct a roadmap?
Strategic technology management tool
Roadmap:
On the horizontal axis:
- where are we now
- how are we going to get there
- where do we want to be
On the vertical axis
Along the vertical axis:
- Why? (commercial perspective)
- Market and Business
- The drivers, the strategy, and the needs
- What? (design and production perspective)
- Product, Service and System
- The form, the function and performance
- How? (technology and research perspective)
- Technology, Science and Resources
- The solutions, capabilities and resources
Explain how roadmaps can be used as platform for integrated toolkits
SWOT
PESTLE
PORTER
TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE
What are the benefits of a roadmap?
- Roadmaps provide a consistent framework throughout the strategic planning/innovation process
- Alignment of business areas from different strategic perspectives.
- Facilitate development and integration of new technology
- Supports strategy and planning process
- Identify new opportunities for exploiting tech and deciding on a tech direction
- Support communication and coordination
- Identify gaps in market and technical knowledge
- Supports resource allocation, risk mgmt and exploitation decisions
What are the different types of technology based firms and what are their issues?
Technology intensive and small:
Examples: uni spin offs, specialist high tech, science based park
Issues: finance availability, staff quality, coordination, needs new technology
Technology intensive and large:
Examples: leading innovators, global competitors, R&D intensive
Issues: think in terms of R&D, technology competent organisation redesign
Tech contingent and small:
Examples: most numerous class, regional companies
Issues: limited capacity, lack of mgmt time, lack of marketing
Tech contingent and large:
Examples: incremental innovators, mature markets, low R&D
Issues: large mature company use available tech of others, organising supplier helps them to innovate
What is open innovation?
Collaborations with other comapnies throughout the development of a new technology including:
- Ideas and technology
- IP inlicensing and outlicensing
- Products insourced (co branding)
- Tech spin outs
Open innovation principles:
- Access knowledge and expertise of bright people outside the company
- Don’t have to originate the research to profit from it
- Build a better business model rather than get to market first
- Make best use of internal and external ideas to win
What are the five management challenges with open innovation?
Can be done in house or ad-hoc external.
Challenges:
- Organisational culture
- Implementation team should try to create OI culture in the firm.
- Skills
- introspective: know your own business
- extrospective: know your partner’s business
- technical: financial, portfolio mgmt.
- interactive: communication, negotiation
- Metrics
- activity vs value
- IP
- how to deal with IP and its costs
- how to agree valuation and royalty rates
- ‘Assymetric partnerships
- Reputational risk
Come to me strategies or go to them!
Define IP management
IP management is about ownership and control. Control mechanisms include
- legal enforcement actions, contacts, royalties, licensing, confidentiality agreements, publishing
IPM is concerned with the strategic and operational decision making, organisational routines and processes regarding the development, maintenance and exploitation of an organisation’s IP asset portfolio, in alignment with its business objectives.
How is infringement determined?
Claims define the features of the development that are protected. Everything that is covered by the claims is protected.
Infringing occurs when infringing product posses features of the claimed invention. Generally speaking production and sale of patents are acts of infringement.
What is the IP risk management approach?
- Identify the risks the company faces
- Assess the severity of those risks
- Manage the steps that should be taken to manage those risks
Generic considerations
- Origin of the risk
- Form of IP involved
- Location, timeframe, likelihood
Sources of risk include:
- internal (e.g. R&D)
- micro IP ecosystem (e.g. suppliers)
- macro IP ecosystem (e.g. competitors, new entrants)
What are the different consequences of IP risks?
- Strategic: big ticket items that can affect the mission, business objectives, strategy and growth of a company.
- e.g. wrong valuation of patent portfolio
- Operational: hazards that arise during day to day runnings
- e.g. trade secrets leaked to employees
- Compliance: relating to the law
- e.g. not complying with open source licensing terms
- Financial: negative impact of money
- e.g. litigation and damage payments
- Reputational: events that undermine public trust
- large scale leak of customer data
What are the approaches for mitigating risk?
- Change risk likelihood
- Change consequences
- Accept risk and pursue opportunity
- Life cycle management
- Complementing patents with other IP (trademarks)
- IP insurance for complementors
- Contactual clauses in licensing
Define IP strategy and the different dimensions
Decision making relating to the ownership and control of IP to maximise value creation and capture from an organisations technology base in alignment with its goals.
Dimensions:
- Agressiveness: defensive vs offensive
- Openness: closed vs open
- Complexity : single vs multiple IPR
- Comprehensiveness: selective vs comprehensive
- Coverage: national vs global
Explain the IP strategy development process.
What should we do?
- which businesses can and should IP strategy support?
- strategic positioning
- revenue generating
- cost reduction
- conflict avoidance
How can we do it?
- which IP assets best support the objectives?
- patents, trademarks, know how, relationships
- which operational IP strategies are best suited for achieving the objectives?
- patenting
- enforcing
- publishing
- secrecy
- inventing around
What is technoloy intelligence?
It is the capture and delivery of information about technology to help the organisation develop an awareness of threats and opportunties.
Involves a tech intelligence team who:
- capture info, develop an insight and deliver that to the decision makers.
Intelligence operating process involves:
- identify
- coordinate
- search
- filter
- analyse
- document
- disseminate
- decide
name the problems affecting insight delivery
- anchoring
- cognitive distance
- distortion
- lack of kudos
- repercussions for the messenger
Explain with a diagram the interaction between decision makers and intelligence teams in technology intelligence
Decision makers must make:
- strategic, operational and technological decisions
They must understand:
- PESTLE
- who, what, why, where, when, how?
Intelligence teams must therefore provide them with:
- identification of opportunities and threats
- assessment of art and profile of trends
To do this they need to understand:
- market, competitive, technology intelligence
by using:
- white or black sources
- internal vs external sources
- tacit vs explicit sources
- primary vs secondary sources
Explain the interaction between intelligence awareness and intelligence provision?
- Trawl: making explicit the intelligence information already in house which is not yet formalised
- Mine: extracting explicit intelligence info from an internal repository
- Scan: keep on top of any technology developments that could impact the business
- Target: monitoring the development of new technlogies identified as relevant for the future
How does a technology consultancy work?
Considers business intelligence and technology intelligence to consider new opportunities
Explain the acquisition process?
Identification
Assessent of opportunities
- context
- Define clear framework by discussing motivations and TRLs
- Importance to the business vs competitive position
- Define what knowledge is needed
- evaluation
- internal, technology and partner issues
- absorptive capacity, cannibalism
- options
- regulate the relationship, ownership, financial exploitation
- different technology development paths
Negotiation
Transfer
What are the different technology development paths?
- Acquire early and develop
- Acquire once developed
- Work in partnership to develop the product/technology innovation
Summarize the principles of strategic roadmapping as a management tool and discuss how a manufacturing business may implement roadmapping to help align its technology and marketing strategies.
Strategic roadmapping is not technology roadmapping (TRM). It is the broader view as emphasized during the lecture. Roadmapping is not a framework for the innovation process only.
- Roadmapping is strategy planning tool which can be used across different organizational levels.
- Roadmapping framework provides strategic alignment, communication and asks three key questions:
- Where do we want to go?
- Where are we?
- How do we get there?
- Roadmapping integrates technology push and pull perspectives. It is a workshop activity where all stakeholders get together and use post-it notes, wall charts and a lot of paper.
- It is important that the relevant decision makers responsible for functions are present.
- Roadmapping can integrate different other types of analyses, such as SWOT, STEEPL, scenario analysis or technology intelligence.
- An important activity to foster communication between different functions.
- Difficulties when using roadmapping, such as
- keeping roadmaps alive and updating it continuously.
Question asks about the alignment of two functional strategies, i.e.
- manufacturing and marketing
Discuss that those need to be aligned with the corporate strategy, which needs to be considered in the implementation process.
For a large manufacturing firm, describe how technology roadmapping and technology intelligence techniques could be used to help the firm respond to the emergence of a new production technology.
Technology roadmapping:
Three stages on the horizontal axis:
- Where the company is
- Where the company wants to be
- And how it is going to get there
Along the vertical axis:
- Why? (commercial perspective)
- Market and Business
- The drivers, the strategy, and the needs
- What? (design and production perspective)
- Product, Service and System
- The form, the function and performance
- How? (technology and research perspective)
- Technology, Science and Resources
- The solutions, capabilities and resources
Technology Intelligence
Is the capture and delivery about information to help the organisation develop an awareness of threats and opportunities.
Usually done by setting up an intelligence team to capture information, develop insight and deliver that to decision makers.
Decision makers have to make:
- strategic, tactical and operational decisions.
To do this they need to know:
- PESTLE
- Who, what, where, when, why, how?
Must ultimately develop:
- Assessment of opportunities, threats, art and trends
By building an understanding of:
- Market, competitive and technological intelligence
Technology Intelligence is found from sources that are:
- white/black, secondary/primary, internal/external/ explicit/tacit
TI system needs people, processes and infrastructures.
TI systems work through 4 modes:
- Mine (aware and known)
- Trawl (unaware and known)
- Target (aware and unknown)
- Scan (unaware and unknown)
Must understand the link between the two (roadmap vs TI):
-
what info do we need to collect:
- where are we now vs what do we know
- where do we want to be vs what do we not know
-
what info do we need to deliver
- how do we get there vs what do we need to know
- market vs market intelligence
- product vs competitive intelligence
- technology vs technology intelligence
Understand the company. Big therefore potentially:
- path dependency
- need to generate returns from existing resources
- more resources
- etc.
Describe three activities that companies might be expected to undertake within each of the five technology management processes below:
(i) identification;
(ii) selection;
(iii) acquisition;
(iv) exploitation;
(v) protection.
Identification:
- Internal R&D;
- External networks (KTNs);
- Patent analysis,
- Academic conferences;
- Trade shows;
- Publications (journals, magazines, other media);
- Customers / end users;
- Competitors;
- Links to universities (funded labs, research, student projects, education, informal links;
- Trade associations and professional bodies;
- Consultants, Scouting, ..
(ii) Selection:
- Link to strategy,
- Business alignment, Benchmarking,
- Feature value analysis,
- Competence analysis,
- TRM / VRM / trajectories,
- Business model,
- Path dependency,
- Portfolio models,
- Valuation techniques (DCF, decision trees, options), ..
(iii) Acquisition:
- Internal R&D labs,
- Transfer from other business units,
- Purchase,
- Licence,
- Partnerships,
- JV, Joint / sponsored research with universities,
- Acquire company,
- Steal / copy, Reverse engineer / tear-down,
- Recruit, Open / distributed innovation activities,
- Open source / public domain material.
(iv) Exploitation:
- New product / service / process,
- Enhanced product service,
- Fusion with existing (internal / external),
- Sell Licence (Exclusive vs. non-exclusive),
- Open source / give away (UNIX) / donate,
- Partnering,..
(v) Protection:
- Registered IP (patents, reg. design),
- Unregistered IP (copyright),
- Secrecy,
- Branding,
- Retain key staff,
- NDAs,
- Contracts,
- Trickery (false patent trails),
- Speed of change,
- Get competing ideas banned,
- Set standard / Dominant design,
- Complexity..
Discuss how a medium-sized manufacturing firm in the automotive sector could apply technology management tools and techniques in order to respond to the emergence of a much hyped but highly uncertain technology such as Additive Manufacturing.
The key issues here are that
- medium sized firm, therefore might assume limited capacity to devote time to exploring new technology opportunities.
- Answer should reference the five technology management processes from part (a) but focus on the ways in which these might be used in the context of process technology.
- Requires them to think about how a technology at its early stage of adoption that is surrounded by lots of information‘noise’
- (e.g. hard to understand the real costs/benefits,
- lots of competing technologies and suppliers, etc)
- High levels of technological and market uncertainty might impact on a resource constrained manufacturing firm
- (e.g. Is this going to be a key source of competitive advantage in the future?
- Can they risk not investing in it?
- Where might investment come from?
- What sort of timescales?
- How might the technology be deployed?).
- The basic answer should demonstrate an understanding of the typical technology management challenges facing a medium sized manufacturing firm, and how technology management tools (such TRM, scenario planning, technology intelligence, MvB analysis etc) might be used to help them deal with these challenges.
Stronger answers might reflect upon the practical challenges of implementing technology management tools and techniques (often designed and developed by large companies) in a relatively small firm. Better answers should also connect the discussion to issues such as the nature of the company’s strategy and ambition, and the sector within which it is operating.
Students could also explore possible different scenarios for the adoption of this technology,ranging from accessing it via a service provider, to transforming the company’s core businessmodel. This could also be considered in the context of different timeframes, and in terms of a phased approach to adoption.
Explain, giving examples, why collaborations are a common feature of technology-intensive industries.
The basic answer should cover:
Key issues:
- technology-intensive industries are characterised by high levels of technological and market uncertainty, which results in high levels of perceived risk.
- One way of managing this is through sharing the risk with others, and also accessing a wider network of resources and capabilities to help reduce the uncertainty.
- To do this requires the development of certain collaborative capabilities that build upon the core of MvB / outsourcing.
- This should be expanded upon through illustration of forms of collaboration in different companies, technologies and sectors.
A better answer might include consideration of:
- The impact of the emergence of ‘open innovation’ and the way in which many firms have developed collaborative capabilities for innovation;
- The way in which different underpinning technologies may lend themselves to a more collaborative approaches within specific sectors (e.g. the ‘open architecture’model of the PC enabled a wide range of collaborative / outsourcing opportunities), as well as the impact that the Internet and WWW has had on a broad range of sectors to enable more collaboration (for SCM, collaborative design, etc)
- The extra dimensions that need to be added to make versus buy decisions when considering early stage technologies.
