Technology and Innovation Management: Theories, methods and practices from Germany and China - Hardcover

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2 Corporate management of innovations (p. 70-71)
Hans Koller: Intercultural technology intelligence a process and communication oriented approach

1 Introduction

The business world is characterized by an acceleration of scientific progress, a shortening of product life cycles, a diffusion of technologies between previously independent branches, and a merging of available technologies into new solutions (Carlson 2004: 51). Globalized and intensified competition forces companies in high-wage countries in particular to keep abreast of technological and competitive changes. In order to seize opportunities and counter risks in an accelerated environment such as this, management must be able to quickly recognize relevant changes in the business world and incorporate them into the process of strategic planning and decision making.

Over the last decades various approaches have been presented, referred to as technology forecasting, technology foresight, and technology intelligence (Lang 1998). However, past and present studies in this field have shown that companies have difficulties mastering this challenge. One of the main problems is the amount of information on global developments that is available every day with the help of modern information and communication technology. What management needs today are less methods to collect information but practical mechanisms to make the flood of information manageable. It must be brought in a position to collect, select and process information without paralyzing the company.

In this paper we present an approach which is able to handle this information overload. The concept was developed together with company partners. The approach is based on the establishment of a hierarchy of "radar groups" and the creation of a "strategy room". The key idea is to exploit existing organizational search routines for foresight to reduce the complexity of information gathering and assure broad and qualified perception and evaluation of relevant changes. The main benefit of such a process is the constant adjustement that helps the organization to face environmental complexity stepwise. The approach matches findings of the late strategy process research (Burgelman 2001) and the capability-based view of the firm (Chakravarthy/Doz 1992). Further, it also addresses intercultural aspects of business and especially technology intelligence.

2 Technology intelligence a short overview

Neither in scholarly discourse nor in corporate practice there are standardized terms defining how to identify and how to handle information about changes affecting the competitive position of a company, especially with respect to their technology resource. At the beginning of the article I therefore differentiate between the terms in use and establish the term that is in accordance with my approach.

Depending on their perspective and the depth of information collection, strategic management community speaks about environmental scanning, environmental analysis, competitive analysis, or business intelligence (Lang 1998: 20). Concentrating on technological and technologically relevant aspects, one can additionally identify a broad spectrum of terms. For a long time, the most frequently used term was "technology forecasting" (Bright 1970, Martino 1983, Millet/Honton 1991). But often "forecasting" means to identify developments in areas in which they are expected and which can therefore be monitored. Today a number of scholars reject the narrow constraints of such a pure analysis of variance and introduce distinctive approaches named "technology foresight" (Stout 1995) or "technology intelligence" (Ashton/Stacy 1995). In support of the view that the terms foresight and intelligence are nearly synonymous, I will use "technology intelligence" and define it with reference to Ashton/Klavans as "collecting, analyzing and communicating t