Exploring Acquiring Technologies: Adoption, Adaptation, and Knowledge Management

Abstract

To ensure that their workforces remain competitive, firms need to learn how to quickly leverage new technologies. In general, companies have two ways to acquire technology. First, choosing any well-marketed technology that other firms use and successfully adopting it according to their company's characteristics, and second, implementing change on existing technology, which utilizes beneficial opportunities or moderates negative effects. This process, which is identified as adapting technology, requires firms to analyze their processes, their employees, and their R&D ability to search and modify an appropriate technology. Since many firms continue to face complex challenges in acquiring technology's performance, the results of this study attempt to understand the relationship between the adoption and adaptation processes as well as the benefits that firms receive in the technology selection phase. This study emphasizes that both technology adoption and adaptation processes are identified as the major sources of technology acquisition. However, our study results highlighted that technology adoption is the most important way to achieve the technology advantages.