Towards a Re-Definition of Technology Management

The paper is proposing an historical approach of the definition and constitution of technology management as a discipline leading to a re-visited approach more in line with contemporary issues and problems facing businesses. It is suggested to expand its scope to the strategic management of technology and innovation

Vers une refondation du management technologique

National audienceLa question de la pertinence de maintenir, voire de développer, des recherches et des enseignements spécifiques en management technologique participe clairement des débats actuels sur le rôle et la place de la recherche scientifique et technique dans la société française (Etats Généraux de la Recherche, 2004, Projet de Loi d'Orientation et de Programmation de la Recherche et de l'Innovation, 2005) et de l'innovation technologique dans la croissance de son économie (Rapport Beffa, 2005). Tant les enjeux de ces débats nationaux que le moment de leur émergence sont considérables. Un consensus s'est établi sur les points de départ : en France la recherche et l'économie sont à un tournant historique. Comme le formule joliment E. Le Boucher (2005), « son industrie date et ses efforts de recherche sont insuffisants et ils n'aboutissent pas... Sa compétitivité est menacée par les Etats-Unis d'un côté, et par la Chine de l'autre ». Lors de sa conférence de presse du 6 janvier 2005, J.L. Beffa affirme même que « l'erreur est d'avoir lié un mouvement de privatisation à un mouvement de non-intervention de l'Etat dans le domaine de l'innovation industrielle.

Vers une refondation du management technologique

La question de la pertinence de maintenir, voire de développer, des recherches et des enseignements spécifiques en management technologique participe clairement des débats actuels sur le rôle et la place de la recherche scientifique et technique dans la société française (Etats Généraux de la Recherche, 2004, Projet de Loi d'Orientation et de Programmation de la Recherche et de l'Innovation, 2005) et de l'innovation technologique dans la croissance de son économie (Rapport Beffa, 2005). Tant les enjeux de ces débats nationaux que le moment de leur émergence sont considérables. Un consensus s'est établi sur les points de départ : en France la recherche et l'économie sont à un tournant historique. Comme le formule joliment E. Le Boucher (2005), « son industrie date et ses efforts de recherche sont insuffisants et ils n'aboutissent pas... Sa compétitivité est menacée par les Etats-Unis d'un côté, et par la Chine de l'autre ». Lors de sa conférence de presse du 6 janvier 2005, J.L. Beffa affirme même que « l'erreur est d'avoir lié un mouvement de privatisation à un mouvement de non-intervention de l'Etat dans le domaine de l'innovation industrielle. »management technologique

Towards a Re-Definition of Technology Management

The paper is proposing an historical approach of the definition and constitution of technology management as a discipline leading to a re-visited approach more in line with contemporary issues and problems facing businesses. It is suggested to expand its scope to the strategic management of technology and innovation.technology management

Realising the head-shadow benefit to cochlear implant users

Cochlear implant (CI) users struggle to understand speech in noise. They suffer from elevated hearing thresholds and, with practically no binaural unmasking, they rely heavily on better-ear listening and lip reading. Traditional measures of spatial release from masking (SRM) quantify the speech reception threshold (SRT) improvement due to the azimuthal separation of speech and interferers when directly facing the speech source. The Jelfs et al. (2011) model of SRM predicts substantial benefits of orienting the head away from the target speech. Audio-only and audio-visual (AV) SRTs in normally hearing (NH) listeners and CI users confirmed model predictions of speech-facing SRM and head-orientation benefit (HOB). The lip-reading benefit (LRB) was not disrupted by a modest 30° orientation. When attending to speech with a gradually diminishing speech-to-noise-ratio (SNR), CI users were found to make little spontaneous use of their available HOB. Following a simple instruction to explore their HOB, CI users immediately reached as much as 5 dB lower SNRs. AV speech presentation significantly inhibited head movements (it nearly eradicated CI users’ spontaneous head turns), but had a limited impact on the SNRs reached post-instruction, compared to audio-only presentation. NH listeners age-matched to our CI participants made more spontaneous head turns in the free-head experiment but were poorer than CI users at exploiting their HOB post-instruction, despite their exhibiting larger objective HOB. NH listeners’ and CI users’ LRB measured 3 and 5 dB, respectively. Our findings both dispel the erroneous beliefs held by CI professionals that facing the speech constitutes an optimal listening strategy (whether for lip-reading or to optimise the use of microphone directionality) and pave the way to obvious translational applications

The factor analysis of speech: limitations and opportunities for cochlear implants

Current spread is known to limit the number of independent spectral channels in cochlear implants. The outcome of an experiment employing cochlear implant simulations indicated that current spread is not the only limitation on the benefit of increasing the number of electrodes: for both sentences and digit triplets, improvements in speech reception threshold slowed markedly once more than seven electrodes/processing channels were simulated. Factor analysis of speech envelopes from the output of an auditory filterbank confirmed that speech contains 6-8 independent sources of information, causing finer spectral filtering to produce redundant information in adjacent channels. It is possible that factor analysis can be used to refine the frequency maps used in cochlear implants in order to minimise the effects of current spread

The benefit of cochlear-implant users' head orientation to speech intelligibility in noise

Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) in noise improve when the speech and noise sources are spatially separated. This spatial release from masking (SRM) is usually investigated in fixed-head situations. We studied free-head situations in audio and audio-visual conditions. We compared normally- hearing and cochlear-implant (CI) users’ spontaneous and directed head- orientation strategies when attending to speech in noise with a progressively declining signal-to-noise ratio. SRM-model predictions suggested benefits of head orientation away from the target speech that we hypothesized would motivate head rotation. As signal-to-noise ratio declined, observed head tracks differed greatly between listeners. Audio-visual presentation reduced the amount of head rotation. When directed, listeners made more effective use of head rotation. Audio and audio-visual SRTs were acquired at fixed, 0, and 30 deg head orientations with respect to the target speech. At the most favourable 30-deg head orientation, SRM reached 8 and 6 dB for NH listeners and CI users respectively. Lip-reading yielded improvements of 3 and 5 dB on average across conditions. CI users confirmed that training in optimizing both their position and head orientation with respect to target speaker and noise source position in a social setting was both currently missing and likely valuable

Cochlear implant simulator with independent representation of the full spiral ganglion

In cochlear implant simulation with vocoders, narrow-band carriers deliver the envelopes from each analysis band to the cochlear positions of the simulated electrodes. However, this approach does not faithfully represent the continuous nature of the spiral ganglion. The proposed “SPIRAL” vocoder simulates current spread by mixing all envelopes across many tonal carriers. SPIRAL demonstrated that the classic finding of reduced speech-intelligibility benefit with additional electrodes could be due to current spread. SPIRAL produced lower speech reception thresholds than an equivalent noise vocoder. These thresholds are stable for between 20 and 160 carriers

Bilateral rhegmatogenous retinal detachment after external-beam radiotherapy: just a coincidence?

Purpose: To report an unusual case of almost simultaneous bilateral rhegmatogenous retinal detachment in the context of external-beam radiotherapy for a tumor at a non-ocular target site and in the absence of pre-existing ocular pathology. Methods: Observational case report with review of corresponding literature. Results: A 63-year-old man was referred for bilateral retinal detachment which was associated with many horseshoe tears and proliferative vitreoretinopathy. He had undergone surgery for a carcinoma of the left maxillary sinus 4 months prior to the presentation and had then received external-beam radiotherapy for 3 months. There was no familial history of retinal detachment and/or eye trauma in this hyperopic patient with clear native lenses. No chorioretinal pathology was apparent that could have predisposed the retinas to tearing. Conclusions: Simultaneous bilateral retinal detachment is exceptional, especially in a patient with no risk factors. The effect of radiotherapy on the vitreoretinal interface is discussed in the light of existing data and may have been responsible for our patient's retinal detachmen

The role of efferent reflexes in the efficient encoding of speech by the auditory nerve

To avoid information loss, the auditory system must adapt the broad dynamic range of natural sounds to the restricted dynamic range of auditory nerve fibers. How it solves this dynamic range problem is not fully understood. Recent electrophysiological studies showed that dynamic-range adaptation occurs at the auditory nerve level, but the amount of adaptation found was insufficient to prevent information loss. We used the physiological MATLAB Auditory Periphery model to study the contribution of efferent reflexes to dynamic range adaptation. Simulating the healthy human auditory periphery provided adaptation predictions that suggest that the acoustic reflex shifts rate-level functions toward a given context level and the medial olivocochlear reflex sharpens the response of nerve fibers around that context level. A simulator of hearing was created to decode model-predicted firing of the auditory nerve back into an acoustic signal, for use in psychophysical tasks. Speech reception thresholds in noise obtained with a normal-hearing implementation of the simulator were just 1 dB above those measured with unprocessed stimuli. This result validates the simulator for speech stimuli. Disabling efferent reflexes elevated thresholds by 4 dB, reaching thresholds found in mild-to-moderately hearing-impaired individuals. Overall, our studies suggest that efferent reflexes may contribute to overcoming the dynamic range problem. Because specific sensorineural pathologies can be inserted in the model, the simulator can be used to obtain the psychophysical signatures of each pathology, thereby laying a path to differential diagnosis