Towards a model for contingency of Management of Technology

The foundation of this paper is a discussion of how different traditions and approaches to Management of Technology (MoT) at the company level can be divided into schools of thought based on a rich view of the environmental challenges facing companies today. Obviously, contingency factors should be related to empirical challenges of firms, thereby enabling technology managers to apply MoT theory pragmatically. It is argued that the existing mappings of MoT theory are. indeed, not sufficiently related to empirical contingency factors. Thus, the main purpose of the paper is to discuss such empirical contingency factors that could be applied to MoT theory and make it more useful for technology managers in practice. The well-known distinction between technology exploitation and disruptive technological change is discussed and dismissed as too simplistic. Instead. three situations for technology management are formulated and briefly related to the MoT theory to round up the paper. The latter forms the main contribution of the paper. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.