Wharton Book Preface

(Example blog posting on a Wharton chapter including summary, research updates, and analysis)

Summary

The Wharton Emerging Technologies Management Research Program, established in 1994, seeks to rigorously study emerging technologies and their impacts on organizations. In particular they focus on the time between discovery of a new technology and when it becomes established commercially, blending the technology and business aspects and addressing the strategies that might be used to commercialize new technologies successfully.

The Wharton approach emphasizes differences between emerging and established technologies, noting that the most interesting things often happen at the “edge” and that emerging technologies have a disruptive and transformational effect for which traditional methods of analysis are inadequate.

Seven priority issues of emerging technologies management are identified:

1. Evaluation (deciding and committing, often in the face of extreme uncertainty)
2. Designing and managing alliances
3. Strategies for participating in emerging technologies (e.g., buy or develop in house)
4. Developing products for really new markets (and possibly new and uncertain customer requirements)
5. Designing organizations to compete in emerging technologies (do new structures have to follow new technologies?)
6. Managing intellectual property
7. Evolution of emerging technology-based industries (as compared to traditional industries)

The book is organized into five sections:

1. Assessing technologies
2. Managing markets
3. Making strategy
4. Investing for the future
5. Rethinking the organization

Research Updates

If this were a chapter that mentioned specific companies, technologies, products, trends, management strategies, etc. it would be useful to look deeper into some and perhaps report confirmatory or contradictory evidence as it compares to any predictions or generalizations the book makes (along with citations for those who wish to follow up).

The Preface is a bit more general than other chapters, though, so this time let's take the luxury of looking at a bigger picture for a moment. For example, we might ask how much work is being done in areas such as "management of technology-based innovation" (mentioned at the top of page vii). One indication is to simply search for newly released (last 90 days) books on Amazon.com using the keywords "technology innovation management." This turns up 110 results (as of 2/11/09). Although there is some room for discussion, a perusal through the titles reveals to this reader's eye that probably a good half are truly related to the management of technology-based innovation in a significant way.

That's a lot of writing about this topic, wouldn't you agree? Would it lead you to wonder whether they are all saying essentially the same or different things, and whether they are making broad generalizations or speaking to specific contexts and environments? Something we need to address is to what extent we will find "answers" versus perhaps a more modest goal of collecting useful tools with which to intelligently evaluate and adapt to new challenges.

Analysis

As the common saying goes, if this were easy then everyone would be doing it. It’s not, and that’s one reason why venture capitalists are often satisfied when only a few percent of their funded projects achieve success (ideally barn-burning success, to make up for the many more projects that lose). So we have to be satisfied at this point with trying to understand the issues, make sense of how they relate, and give ourselves the best chance of success that we can. If we’re going to play poker, at least we want to understand the rules and the odds as best we can (and with emerging technologies, remember that the rules and even the game itself can change).

Emerging technologies can be destroyers of business models. This can be great if you’re a startup not caring about the status quo, but what if you are an established player? Do you have to put yourself out of business before someone else does it for you? (We will see this as it relates to "creative destruction" later on.)

Successful exploitation of emerging technologies can be a maddening exercise. How must an inventor feel when she develops a technology that can save lives, only to be thwarted by burdensome patent squabbles, lengthy regulatory processes, and other non-technical hurdles? Why do seemingly superior technologies sometimes fail, and inferior ones succeed? Why do some innovations take off right away, and others languish for decades before finally gaining traction? What explains the ability of some technologies to re-make human interpersonal behavior, while others are rejected because they don’t respect the most subtle customs? How does society adjust the scales of worth in the face of a multi-billion dollar annual market for mere downloadable ring tones on cell phones?

In studying emerging technologies, we hope future chapters of this book will be one source of light shed on the many challenges . . .