A study on technology management process: the parts and components suppliers in the Turkish automotive industry

This paper summarizes part of an empirical study on technology management process in the Turkish automotive parts and components industry. In this study, technology management practices in the Turkish automotive parts and components suppliers' sector are described and evaluated. Practices, techniques, and approaches are proposed to improve the level of technology management so as to turn technology into a competitive weapon. The investigation is organized within the framework of a process model for technology management that consists of technology identification, selection, acquisition, exploitation, protection, and abandonment. A comprehensive questionnaire addressing all phases of this process is developed and the results of 21 companies are presented

Strategic Foresight in multinational enterprises – a case study on the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

Strategic Foresight activities enable companies to use weak signals to identify opportunities and threats. Research on Strategic Foresight proposes different methods, discusses their implementation and gives recommendations on how to link Strategic Foresight with other functions in an organization. Based on a literature review, we define a generic framework for the management of Strategic Foresight activities on the strategic, tactical and operational level and identify and discuss actors, methods and systems of Strategic Foresight. Building on an in-depth case study of the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories we shed light on the implementation of Strategic Foresight activities. In the discussion we focus on the interaction of methods from Consumer Foresight and Technology Intelligence. Taking an example project, we explore how Strategic Foresight is used on the operational level of innovation management. We conclude that Strategic Foresight can successfully contribute to coping with uncertainty and complexity and can feed the front-end of innovation from the market (customer needs) and technology (realization opportunities) perspective.strategic foresight; consumer foresight; technology foresight; technology intelligence; market foresight; trend analysis; future studies; future analysis; telecommunication industry

Knowledge management, innovation and big data: Implications for sustainability, policy making and competitiveness

This Special Issue of Sustainability devoted to the topic of “Knowledge Management, Innovation and Big Data: Implications for Sustainability, Policy Making and Competitiveness” attracted exponential attention of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers from all over the world. Locating themselves at the expanding cross-section of the uses of sophisticated information and communication technology (ICT) and insights from social science and engineering, all papers included in this Special Issue contribute to the opening of new avenues of research in the field of innovation, knowledge management, and big data. By triggering a lively debate on diverse challenges that companies are exposed to today, this Special Issue offers an in-depth, informative, well-structured, comparative insight into the most salient developments shaping the corresponding fields of research and policymaking

Technology Scouting – a case study on the Deutsche Telekom Laboratories

Technology Intelligence has become an important field of study in which a variety of different methods are discussed, all aiming at identifying opportunities and threats arising from advances in technology. In this respect, Technology Scouting is a method which can lower the time lag between the advances in technology and their detection by methods such as patent or publication analysis. Furthermore, in an environment of increasing technological complexity and the globalization of R&D, the successful identification and usage of external sources of knowledge is becoming increasingly important. In the sourcing of technology the scouts can also play an important role in identifying valuable sources and facilitate the sourcing. Based on two case studies of the Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom, as well as a literature review, the paper proposes a definition of Technology Scouting, a generic process, and identifies the motivations of the actors in the process.technology intelligence, technological forecasting, technology foresight; technology scouting; technology exploration; strategic foresight; technology monitoring; technology scanning

Developing a new business model for enabling research - the case of the ACPFG in Australia

Publisher's postprint archived as permitted by publisher.The way in which companies, research centres and educational institutions are organised and structured may provide a competitive advantage for commercialisation, in particular if companies are dependent on the deployment of complementary assets and capabilities by third parties. This paper presents the case of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG), a private agricultural biotechnology (agbiotech) company specialising in early stage Research and Development (R&D) to produce superior adapted cereal varieties, tolerant to abiotic stress conditions such as drought, frost, salt, or mineral toxicity, all of which have a direct and negative impact on plant growth and crop productivity. The organisational structure of the company has been influenced and shaped by Government policy, shareholders expectations and trends in the agbiotech industrial organisation. It has proved attractive to potential alliance partners for collaborative R&D and commercialisation. We present the ACPFG as a new business model to fund basic research and facilitate technology transfer.Stephanie C. Agius, David Corkindale, Antonio G. Dottore, Michael Gilber

Multi-actor regional governance: regions as new players for innovation in Europe

In recent years, new regionally based strategy building processes emerged at the interface between public policy and the social coordination of collective action. Foresight as a governance process for stimulating regional innovation and for strengthening the regional economic system against global competition became a popular concept. Based on the experiences of a strategy building process in the Italian autonomous province of Trento, it is the objective of the paper to sketch recent theoretical and political developments regarding multi-actor and multi-level governance and policy concepts at the regional level.

Information Outlook, July 2006

Volume 10, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2006/1006/thumbnail.jp

Weak signal identification with semantic web mining

We investigate an automated identification of weak signals according to Ansoff to improve strategic planning and technological forecasting. Literature shows that weak signals can be found in the organization's environment and that they appear in different contexts. We use internet information to represent organization's environment and we select these websites that are related to a given hypothesis. In contrast to related research, a methodology is provided that uses latent semantic indexing (LSI) for the identification of weak signals. This improves existing knowledge based approaches because LSI considers the aspects of meaning and thus, it is able to identify similar textual patterns in different contexts. A new weak signal maximization approach is introduced that replaces the commonly used prediction modeling approach in LSI. It enables to calculate the largest number of relevant weak signals represented by singular value decomposition (SVD) dimensions. A case study identifies and analyses weak signals to predict trends in the field of on-site medical oxygen production. This supports the planning of research and development (R&D) for a medical oxygen supplier. As a result, it is shown that the proposed methodology enables organizations to identify weak signals from the internet for a given hypothesis. This helps strategic planners to react ahead of time