Discuss organizational suitability when deciding on technology innovations.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Important considerations in deciding about technological innovations include your organization's culture, managers' interests, and stakeholders' expectations. Some companies are proactive innovators with outward-looking, opportunistic cultures. Executives in these prospector firms give considerable priority to developing and exploiting technological expertise, and decision makers tend to have bold intuitive visions of the future. Technology champions articulate competitively aggressive, first-mover strategies. In many cases, executives are more concerned about the opportunity costs of not taking action than they are about the potential to fail.

By contrast, defender firms hold a more circumspect posture toward innovation. These firms operate in more stable environments, so their strategies employ complementary technologies that extend rather than replace their current ones.

A hybrid analyzer firm, needs to stay technologically competitive but tends to allow others to demonstrate solid demand in new arenas before it responds. These firms adopt early follower strategies to grab dominant positions using their strengths in marketing and manufacturing more than through technological innovation.

Early adopters of new technologies tend to be larger, more profitable, and more specialized. Therefore, they are in an economic position to absorb the risks. Managers who adopt early are comfortable dealing with uncertainty and have strong problem-solving capabilities. Thus, early adopters manage the difficulties of less fully developed technologies.

One additional consideration is the impact the new technology will have on employees. Their cooperation (or lack thereof) often is a major factor in determining how difficult and costly the introduction of new technology will be.