Approaches to identifying emerging technology

PMP (2008) describes four contrasting approaches to identifying new technologies which may give a company a competitive edge if they are involved in manufacturing or are looking to improve their supply chain effectiveness. These are the four alternative approaches which apply to e-business technologies (the author describe them for manufacturing and supply chain approaches) and equally to other technologies:

1. Technology networking. This involves individuals monitoring trends through their personal network and technology scouting and then sharing them through an infrastructure and process that supports information sharing. PMP (2008) give Novartis as an example of a company using this approach. They facilitate sharing between inside and outside experts on specific technologies through an extranet and face-to-face events.
2. Crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing facilitates access to a marketplace of ideas from customers, partners or inventors for organizations looking to solve specific problems. Eli Lilly is cited as an example of a company using this approach. Lego is well known for involving customers in discussion of new product developments. InnoCentive (Figure 4.14) is one of the largest commercial examples of crowdsourcing. It is an online market­place which connects and manages the relationship between ‘seekers’ and ‘solvers’. Seekers are the companies conducting research and development that are looking for new solu­tions to their business challenges and opportunities. Solvers are the 170,000 registered members of InnoCentive who can win cash prizes ranging from $5,000 to $1,000,000 for solving problems in a variety of domains including business and technology.
3. Technology hunting. This is a structured review of new technology through reviewing the capabilities of start-up companies. For example, British Telecom undertakes a structured review of up to 1,000 start-ups to assess relevance for improving their own capabilities
   which may ultimately be reduced to five companies that BT will enter into a formal arrangement with each year.
4. Technology mining. A traditional literature review of technologies described in published documents. Deutsche Telekom AG is given as an example. They use technology to auto­mate the process through software such as Autonomy which searches for patterns indi­cating potential technology solutions within patents, articles, journals, technological reports and trend studies. A simpler approach is setting up a keyword search for tech­nologies through a free service such as Google Alerts (google.com/alerts).

It may also be useful to identify how rapidly a new concept is being adopted. When a prod­uct or service is adopted rapidly this is known as ‘rapid diffusion’. The access to the Internet is an example of this. In developed countries the use of the Internet has become widespread more rapidly than the use of TV, for example. It seems that in relation to Internet access and interactive TV, Internet-enabled mobile phones are relatively slow-diffusion products!

So, what action should e-commerce managers take when confronted by new techniques and technologies? There is no straightforward rule of thumb, other than that a balanced approach must be taken. It would be easy to dismiss many new techniques as fads, or classify them as ‘not relevant to my market’. However, competitors will probably be reviewing new techniques and incorporating some, so a careful review of new techniques is required. This indicates that benchmarking of ‘best of breed’ sites within sectors and in different sectors is essential as part of environmental scanning. However, by waiting for others to innovate and review the results on their web site, a company may have already lost 6 to 12 months. Figure 4.15 summarizes the choices. The stepped curve I shows the variations in technology through time. Some may be small incremental changes such as a new operating system, others such as the introduction of personalization technology are more significant in deliv­ering value to customers and so improving business performance. Line A is a company that is using innovative business techniques, that adopts technology early, or is even in advance of what the technology can currently deliver. Line C shows the conservative adopter whose use of technology lags behind the available potential. Line B, the middle ground, is probably the ideal situation where a company monitors new ideas as early adopters trial them and then adopts those that will have a positive impact on the business.

Source: Dave Chaffey (2010), E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice, Prentice Hall (4th Edition).