Understanding and Acquiring Technology Assets for Global Competition

Technology assets play a crucial role in enabling the competitiveness of companies in most industries. Several authors have proposed models which illustrate the role of these assets during different phases of a company’s development. In this paper develop a model that shows the important role of technology, human expertise, organizational structure, and information assets in positioning a company for global competition. This model integrates earlier work by Christensen and Overdorf (2000), Leonard-Barton (1992), Sharif (1995), and Subramaniam and Youndt (2005) to show the similarities that hide behind the unique terminology presented in these earlier works. In this paper we attempt to clearly identify the types of technology assets that a company must acquire and apply in order to be successful in the marketplace. Numerous authors have talked about the importance of managing technologies and “weaving streams of technology” without explicitly defining these technologies. We suggest that managers must consider much more than just traditional R&D and the acquisition of new equipment that represent “hard technology”. Rather, a manager must leverage the power of humanware, technoware, inforware, and orgaware. Further, we suggest that each of these plays a dominant role during a different phase of a company’s lifecycle. As an asset moves from a dominant position to a supporting position, it moves from a differentiating competency, to an operational capability.