Leveraging technology foresight to create temporal advantage

Abstract

The knowledge economy stands at the very edge of global chaos. As the business environment continues its rapid changes, possible organizational outcomes range from unmitigated disaster, to survival, to unparalleled success. Any particular outcome rests on the mostly mystical relationship between the technology ecology, human nature, decision cycles, information technologies, and the speed and veracity of their interactions. Intuition and inhibition, including subcognitive information processing, are the final bases from which the dominant members of the senior management team make most critical decisions. Intuition equates to personal (and sometimes shared) mental models based upon experience, training, conditioning and education. Such mental constructs are extremely powerful because they are held as “truth,” and not as personalized models of perceived reality. Unfortunately, it is only the truly exceptional executive that cognitively updates existing mental models. Assuming global parity and access to equal quality in technologies and components, the future success of the enterprise becomes dependent upon its ability to gather and integrate the massive flows of information, to create knowledge, and then act decisively. The cumulative effects of these factors impact the perceived value of all the information used in decision making. The Management of Accelerated Technology and Innovation project (MATI), through its relationship with the Center for Technology and Innovation Management (CTIM) at Northwestern University, is currently beginning exploration of how to create information dominance. At the core of this exploration is the application of knowledge systems and decision processes that enable the dominant management team to exploit asymmetry, asynchronicity (concept of time-based bursts of knowledge collected, interpreted, and acted on) to improve decision making. Improved decision making, will, in turn, create temporal niches of advantage within the overall corporate battle-space.