The Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation

Abstract

The strategic management of technology and innovation is an important contributor to organizational performance and competitiveness. It creates value, assists differentiation, enhances productivity, and guides creativity and initiative. In the face of uncertainty in operating environments, caused especially by rapid technological change, the strategic management of innovation configures capabilities and resources within organizations. These include the capability to search for innovations, select the most advantageous, and appropriate or capture their returns. It involves investing in sources of innovation, such as research and development (R&D) and collaboration with external partners, and using methods for effectively assessing their contributions. Unstable and turbulent operating conditions can disrupt established organizational policies and practices and make planning difficult. As a result, strategies for technology and innovation are necessarily emergent rather than prescriptive, exploratory rather than determinable. Any advantages technology and innovation create are likely to be transitory. The pressing need for greater environmental sustainability, increased focus on the social consequences of innovation, and the impact of new digital and data-rich technologies, add to the challenges of the strategic management of technology and innovation. To address these challenges, attention to physical and intellectual capital needs to be supplemented by greater concern for human, social, and natural capital, and to organizational culture and behavior. This requires the foundation of the strategic management of technology and innovation in the discipline of economics to be complemented by others, such as psychology, organizational behavior, and ethics.