WORKING WITH EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
The Definition
Emerging Technologies are those that are technologically immature, or those that are mature but have not yet achieved their potential level of acceptance and market penetration.
The Problem
There are three fundamental tenets of working with emerging technologies, but these characteristics incur far-reaching effects which undermine many of the normal working practices – whether strategy, marketing, financial performance or organisational issues – which most people will have learnt. The three characteristics are change, risk and uncertainty.
Change
Almost all companies base their tools, techniques, and approaches on understanding what is happening then analysing and agreeing how to react. Strategy planning is based upon an environment of stability. Once an accurate prediction of the future is not possible, strategy formulation becomes a different activity altogether. How is a company able to know what to do ?
Risk
At a high level, one of the objectives of management is to reduce risk. In project management it is an explicit aim. Most business processes contain tasks to reduce risk in order to prevent employees from making poor decisions with investor’s capital. How do you ensure that you take a sensible course of action in a situation where all the options are risky and your traditional tools cannot quantify the different levels of risk ?
Uncertainty
If the previous two aspects seem fundamental characteristics of normal, everyday business, then uncertainty is the characteristic which causes even greater difficulties. Without a clear understanding of what is happening, and what the outcomes are of different actions, decision-making can be hindered or even prevented. How to continue with “business-as-usual” in the face of decision paralysis ?
The result of these alterations to normal business means that you need:
“a different set of management skills, frameworks, and strategies than those used by established firms to manage existing technologies”
(Source: Day & Schoemaker, Wharton Business School)
The Solution
The key element to competing and succeeding in this environment of high change, risk and uncertainty is the multi-disciplinary analysis of the emerging technologies. This means not only a technical evaluation, but also creativity regarding the revenue models and an iterative process for designing solutions that the market will actually purchase.
To do this requires a good grasp of the industry and its key drivers in order to have a gut feeling as to how the participants and their roles in the sector might develop over time, as well predicting how new competitors might enter the market. A detailed insight into current and future customers is essential. An appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of your own organisation is needed to assess what is and is not possible to achieve.
The team working with the emerging technologies is often referred to as an “Advanced Technology Group”. This ATG needs to:
This requires some specialist skills in order to be able to accomplish the above bullet points. Another obstacle is that every industry and organisation is different, so superlative performance can never be achieved by simply copying another organisation.
However, there are tools which help to make judgements based on ambiguous and/or incomplete data. The key ones are real options analysis and scenario planning – which are require experience to use correctly but are not fundamentally invalidated by environments of high risk, change and uncertainty.
Managing emerging technologies is a complex set of skills, tools and techniques. At its core is a structured approach to dealing with technological uncertainties, ambiguous market signals, and embryonic competitive structures that accompany emerging technologies. The key outcome is to enable organisations to better understand the future of their industry and any potential disruptive innovations, which in turn reduces the risk of the company becoming uncompetitive.
I am keenly interested in this topic so if you want to contact me to talk about these issues, please do – jeepwrek@yahoo.com. You can always access my blog (http://jeepwrek.blogspot.com) if you would like to view and/or comment on some of the articles I have written.