Wharton on Managing Emerging Technologies

By: George S. Day, Robert E. Gunther, Paul J.H. Schoemaker

John Wiley & Sons

Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Professor of Marketing, and Director of the Huntsman Center for Global Competition and Innovation at the Wharton School. He is the author of Market Driven Strategy and The Market Driven Organization. He co-authored the recently published Peripheral Vision with Schoemaker and is coeditor of Wharton on Dynamic Competitive Strategy. Schoemaker is Research Director of Wharton’s Emerging Technologies Management Research program and also founder and chairman of Decision Strategies International, Inc. Gunther was the coordinating writer for Wharton on Dynamic Competitive Strategy and Wharton on Making Decisions.

In the first two chapters that serve as an introduction, the authors suggest that a “different game” with different rules is now being played and explain how to avoid the various “pitfalls” of emerging technologies. The material that then follows is carefully organized within Four Parts:

  1. “Assessing Technologies”: Day, and Schoemaker , explore technologies’ various paths of development, recommend frameworks for evaluating them, and suggest what the role of government should be during the emergence of both technologies and industries.
  2. “Managing Markets”: They examine why emerging markets (so different from mature technology markets) require new approaches to research and assessment.
  3. “Making Strategy”: They explore the various demands of strategy formulation in emerging technology firms that include the need to combine discipline and imagination, the use of scenario planning, and strategies for dividing the joint gains.
  4. “Investing for the Future”: In this final part, Day and Schoemaker offer insights on using real options to help assess the value and potential of emerging technologies for projects in which NPV may be negative.

For whom will this book be most valuable? Those in organizations which have begun–or are about to begin–development of technologies which they hope can achieve and then sustain a competitive advantage and require expert guidance on how to manage those technologies effectively. In addition, those in organizations that need expert advice when confronted with technologies (developed elsewhere) face disruption of a given competitive marketplace and thus pose a serious threat. For executives in both groups, there really is a “different game to be played,” one that has different rules. Winning or losing that game may depend on understanding the issues and concepts which Day and Schoemaker explain in their book.

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