Understanding Technology in Business Networks
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The document discusses technology in business networks and its management. It explains that companies need a wide range of skills and technologies to meet customer needs that are developing rapidly. To control costs and innovation, companies must collaborate and acquire technologies externally through partnerships or licensing. The text also outlines frameworks for analyzing a company's technological assets and adopting innovations through incremental or breakthrough approaches to adapt to changing business environments and networks.
Understanding Technology in Business Networks
- 1. Understanding Technology in Business Networks Overview
- 2. Introduction • Companies are likely to need an increasingly wide range, of know-how, skills, abilities or technologies in order to provide the offerings that their customers need. • The cost to the company of developing its technologies is likely to increase with each new generation of offerings. • The rate of technological change outside the company is accelerating and competitors are engaged in a desperate race to introduce new technologies into their operations and offerings.
- 3. Introduction • New competitors often arrive in established industries. Using innovative technologies that have been used in quite different applications. • Companies cannot afford to develop and maintain in their own company all the skills and technologies that they need for their offerings. • A countries patent output is an indicator of innovation and competitive position in the global economy.
- 4. International Patenting Output The U.S.A leading patenting outputs and has a excellent innovation base for future growth.
- 5. Technology in a Company Three tasks: 1. Acquire technology 2. Exploit 3. Manage
- 6. Figure 1.0 Tasks in technology External – License – In Contract Research Neither Hire Staff Internal – R & D Joint Venture Reverse Engineering ACQUISITION MANAGEMENT EXPLOITATION Internal – own External – offerings and Lincense – Out processes Joint Venture
- 7. Acquire Technology Companies have three alternative ways of acquiring technology: • Internal acquisition • External acquisition • Don’t acquire the technology
- 8. Exploit Technology • Internal Exploitation – Companies exploiting their own technologies. • External Exploitation – Companies exploit its technologies by selling them to others by license or turn key.
- 9. Managing Technology • Commercialise new technologies • Transferring technologies • Developing and implementing policies for technology exploitation
- 10. Examining Technology A company’s technologies can be separated into two broad types: 1. Product technologies – Provide the ability to design a particular type of offering. i.e. McDonald could apply the same technology to design a pizza 2. Process technologies – Provide the ability to produce or fulfill an offering, on time, in the right place to the right specification, at the right price and do this consistently. i.e. McDonalds developed a scoop to stack French fries. A combination of product and processes is always needed.
- 11. Example 1 • Many retailers specify the design (product technology) of the offerings that they wish to buy and manufacturing methods (process technologies) that will be used to produce the offerings.
- 12. Example 2 • A company may design an offering (product technology), but either by choice or necessity it may rely on another company with the appropriate process technology to manufacture it.
- 13. Basic and distinctive technologies • Basic technologies – technologies a company depends on and without could not operate in a particular network. • Distinctive technologies – Technologies that are seen “special by customers and is a source of competitive advantage.
- 14. The technology adoption cycle Source – Adopted from Moore 1991
- 15. Technology and Networks • A network consists of companies, each having a different product and process technologies. • A combination of the technologies from many companies is needed to provide an offering that will meet the needs of the end-consumer. • Relationships between companies in a network enable this process to take place.
- 16. Technology and Networks • Stability and change • Adapting to the network • The company’s own developments • Relating to developments elsewhere • Technology development between customer and supplier
- 17. Technology in Relationships • Relationships act as pipelines bringing technologies of two companies together. • They create the frame within which technological development takes place. • They become a technological resource for the two companies.
- 18. Innovation can be defined as New Ideas + action or implementation which results in an improvement, gain, or profit
- 19. Evolutionary & Strategic Technology Management Strategic Evolutionary planning Model What Industry do we want to build? What market segment or application? What are the enabling technologies?
- 20. Three Types Of Innovation Product Modification Explicit Customer End Users’ Needs Unarticulated Breakthrough Needs Research Type A: New Market or Industry
- 21. Three Types Of Innovation Product End Users Modification Breakthrough Research Explicit Customer Needs Type B: Changing the Basis of Competition
- 22. Three Types Of Innovation End Users Product Modification Explicit Customer Needs Type C: Line Extension
- 23. Summary • Business marketers need an appreciation of the issues that their companies face in technology. • A company’s technologies are its prime assets. • Relationships are essential to exploit and develop technology. • Technology is essential if a relationship is to have any value to a customer and supplier • Business marketers need an appreciation of the issues that their companies face in technology. • A company’s technologies are its prime assets. • Relationships are essential to exploit and develop technology.
- 24. Summary • A company’s technology is the total sum of all that exists “between the ears” of its staff. • Technology includes patented designs of physical products and services and complex operating systems. • It also includes how to put offerings together that will solve customer problems. • Business marketers must have a clear idea of the technologies they really have, both product and process. • Finally, when a customer takes a decision to buy an offering from a supplier it is doing so because it believes that the supplier has the ability to design, develop and fulfill an offering that will solve a particular problem.
- 25. You are welcome to contact Nigel Bairstow at B2B Whiteboard your source of B2B Asia / Pacific marketing advice http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nigel-bairstow/6/41b/726 http://twitter.com/#!/b2bwhiteboard