Technology executives in the sixth R&D generation context: new ways to organisational innovativeness via ‘expeditionary’ leadership

Abstract

This article is focused on the technology management issues and covers the following core topics: leadership in the technology-related organizations, technology executives’ – and especially, Chief Technology Officers’- functionality, open versus close innovations and innovation support. In this paper, the authors attempt to analyze the changing conditions of the current technology management processes associated with the accelerating dynamics of organizational transformations, strengthening boundaries of cross-disciplinary technologies application and generally increased the speed of the advanced technologies development. Such drastic changes obviously affect the way and manner of the modern management processes implementation. Nowadays each company - to a more or less extent - is a technology-driven organization. Digitization, cyber-physical systems and artificial intelligence are the key drivers for the changing business circumstances. Consequently, management and technology today are so intertwined that without a holistic and conceptual understanding of the core principles of this interdisciplinary tandem it is just not possible to be at the crest of the ‘business success wave’. Overall, the socio-economical effect of the increasingly complex technologies obviously requires new forms of management and leadership so as new - appropriate and workable in the actual conditions - management tools. In terms of the technology executives’ professional functionality, it is important also to pay attention to the ‘back effect’ of the aforementioned technological impact. On the one hand, technology executives are increasingly appointed as members of the top management team (TMT). But on the other hand, it means that they should be understood by specialists from different non-directly related to technologies areas (i.e. financiers, strategists, business process managers, etc.). In other words, in order to bring the technological perspective in the general management process and further have a sustainable managerial impact on the internal and external stakeholders, technology executives should also be leaders with abilities to recognize how applied technologies are perceived from other perspectives of organizational functioning. In this context, modern technology executives should perform the role of ‘boundary spanners’ by means of establishing informational and managerial links among different groups and persons at the intra- and extra-organizational levels. Thus, integrating different facets of technology perception from the core stakeholders and directly or indirectly maintaining coordination of their activities, technology executives could increasingly act as agents of organizational change and innovations promotion.