Tech­no­logy Strategies

Course content

Just like financial and human resources, technology has critical importance in organizations, and the management of technology is a basic business function. Just as we need financial or human resource strategies, organizations need to develop a technology strategy, which serves as a basis for the overall company strategy.

In this course, technology strategy will be studied by analyzing the economic and strategic factors that guide - or should guide - firms' decisions regarding the generation, commercialization, protection, and adoption of technological innovations. The emphasis is on the development and application of economic and strategy tools which are critical for insightful long-term planning when deciding the sources of innovation (internal vs. external), how much to invest in internal R&D, whether to seek intellectual property protection, whether to develop and commercialize an invention in-house or sell it through arm's-length licensing contracts, or other cooperative strategies such as joint ventures or the sale of a technology-based firm's equity. Topics including platforms and digitalisation, economies of agglomeration, AI tools, university-industry collaborations will also be discussed.

Technology markets are analyzed from both a seller's and buyer's perspective. Internal technology commercialization may entail the exploitation of first-mover advantages or specialized downstream capabilities. Other topics covered include the analysis of situations, increasingly observed in several high-tech industries, where firms create and accumulate technological innovations without exploiting them directly, using them instead for technological negotiations with other firms or for preempting potential rivals from entering an industry.