26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Technology management is a major concern for IAMOT community, it deals among other with observing company strategies and developing management approaches to help top managers in the definition and valorization of technologies allowing the development of the company. In this research technology is considered as a complex system of knowledge and know-how supported by equipment (Yanez and Kahlil, 2010). This includes scientific and technical knowledge as well as business abilities (knowledge mobilized for the economical exploitation of technic: supply chain management, sales and other businesses). Literature attests of decision aided approaches to strengthen the elaboration of the technological strategy of companies (Cooper, 2000; Kaplan and Jarzabkowski, 2006; Kim and Mauborgne, 2010). These approaches are always evolving as the context of companies is changing. In this research on the identification of scenario about the company’s profession and knowledge of tomorrow and the corresponding tomorrow business ecosystem outside the company, the following concepts are studied and combined: - The theory of evaluation applied to the field of knowledge. Attention is directed toward the data collection and treatment approaches required considering some theoretical aspects: the existence or not of standards, the influence of the evaluator on the system to be evaluated, the importance of the scale and context (does a particular knowledge have the same interest and value according to the targeted markets?) and the knowledge dynamic (considering employees mobility and the effects of experience among others), - The concept of Value. The evaluation of Value is a major concern when choosing the technology to adopt in the company (Kumar and Reinartz, 2016). Value is considered as multi-criterial with the integration of financial, marketing, reputational, sustainable and strategic criteria (Boly, 2016). One problem is the temporal dimension: Value is unstable if considering short or long term, - The notion of innovation. On many markets, innovation becomes an asset for competitors. Then, the newness degree of the potential products that can be produced with a candidate technology is important in the decision process (Garcia and Calantone, 2002). Moreover, as being the first to launch a product on the market may be crucial, the newness degree of the knowledge to be valorized itself may be an element to focus on, - The notion of prospective scenario. Technology is moving, hence some authors consider digitalization as a world revolution (Lindstone, 2011).Then, uncertainty remains high on the future context of companies and consequently the elaboration of different scenarios modeling different potential future environments of the company is applied. Moreover, technology may require heavy investments and then a long term exploitation, as consequence the long term impact of a technologic choice has to be studied. In this research, to contribute to the scientific production about technology identification and evaluation in a context of innovation, the previous concepts are studied and their combination is analyzed thanks a literature review. As one objective is to elaborate a decision-making aid approach, a data collection and treatment approach is suggested including: an internal census of the core competencies, data about the environment, scenarios about the emergence of some technologies, the elaboration of a global strategy and the identification of a plan of progress including the in-house process of development of the technology or out-sourcing scenarios. Finally an experiment of the approach is described within SME manufacturing luminaires.