Strategic Development, Technology Transfer, and Strategic Technology Assessment in Changing Environments

It is now evident that sustainability of an organisation is affected by its capability for the utilisation and development of new technologies. This potential, as the engine of strategic development of organisations, is based on the quality and quantity of the transfer of technology into organisations in both developed and developing countries. The fact that organisations in the first world are capable to create and provide new technologies, which is far from the passive transfer of technology, should be consider as an additional opportunity for viable strategic development in these organisations. In fact, international transfer of technology is a crucial basis for ‘technology innovation’ in the industrialised world and for ‘technological change’ in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a conceptual model in which strategic technologies can be comprehensively evaluated in the context of strategic development. This requires the integration of qualitative and quantitative variables within a ‘subjective assessment approach’. Therefore, it is necessary decomposing the concepts of the technology system and technology transfer in the context of strategic and dynamic development. Based on this understanding we introduce a procedure for obtaining a reliable index which enables us to evaluate and rank candidate options. We define this index, Technology Index, to be the outcome of the proposed model for technology evaluation and strategic choice. Introduction Coping with environment changing and inevitable technological change is now a major strategic issue for viable organisations. A result of recent fast changes in industrial context is