The Future of Technology Management and the Business Environment: Lessons on Innovation, Disruption, and Strategy Execution

• Gain powerful insights for crafting strategy in technology-rich industries, from IT to finance, and healthcare to energy
• Understand the massive social impacts of technology, and how today’s societal divisions shape your opportunities to innovate
• For everyone who must manage new technologies and respond to technological disruption

From biotech to nanotech to big data, the pace of technological disruption continues to accelerate. Now, leading business strategy expert Alfred Marcus offers powerful tools for anticipating technological change, and managing the threats and opportunities it poses.

Through insightful case studies, Marcus offers strategic advice for overcoming the pitfalls associated with deploying emerging technologies, or responding to others who use them to compete with you.

Marcus illuminates the ongoing interplay between technological change and wider societal trends, helping you recognize new opportunities created by these interactions, and maximize the upside–both for your company and the broader society.

Whether you’re an executive or strategist, technical professional or MBA student, this guide will sharpen your focus on the future so you can navigate radical technological-driven change–wherever it leads.

Emerging technologies offer immense promise for generating growth, profitability, and prosperity. But they face major obstacles to commercialization, and have environmental and social costs that must be carefully managed to maximize the benefit and mitigate the harm.

This book is about the foresight and strategic actions required for these new technologies to play a positive rather than negative role. Alfred Marcus illuminates their potential, reviews the risky decisions needed to transform potential into reality, and discusses how technologies might be used to ameliorate social problems rather than exacerbate them.

Marcus begins with insights about the strategy of technological innovation, using case studies to show why these innovations can fail, and offering methods for dealing with uncertain outcomes. Next, using examples such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, he illustrates how to better manage the dangers associated with technologies. He then turns to technology’s impact on three key societal conflicts: that between young and old, rich and poor, and the potential for scarcity and abundance in energy production. Finally, he focuses on how several pairs of companies, including Intel and AMD, Dell and Acer, and Amazon and Barnes & Noble, have managed technological disruption in their industries, and the difficult challenges they now face in overcoming these challenges.

Whether you’re an executive, manager, or student, you’ll gain powerful insights into innovation, strategy, execution, technology management, and the fastchanging business environment in which technological change takes place.

SOURCING THE NEXT SET OF BREAKTHROUGHS

Exploring the horizon in information technology, medicine, genetics, energy, and materials

PRACTICAL BUSINESS LESSONS FROM TECHNOLOGICAL FAILURES

Managing the uncertainties and dangers of technological investment and deployment

SITUATING NEW TECHNOLOGY IN A COMPLEX WORLD

How the social environment shapes technological impacts and opportunities

COPING WITH TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTION: OPEN-ENDED CASE STUDIES

How enterprises have responded to technological change, and what they might do next

Alfred A. Marcus is the Edson Spence Chair of Strategy and Technological Leadership at the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management and the Center for Technological Leadership. He is the author or co-author of many books, including Innovations in Sustainability published by Cambridge University Press; Management Strategy, published by McGraw Hill; Strategic Foresight, published by Palgrave MacMillan; and Big Winners and Big Losers, published by Pearson. His articles have appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, California Management Review, Business and Politics, Business and Society, and Organization Science, among other places.

His Ph.D. is from Harvard, and he has undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. Besides teaching in the Carlson School and Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, Professor Marcus teaches in the Industrial Engineering Department in the MBA program in the Technion in Israel. He also has taught management courses in France, Norway, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Costa Rica.

Professor Marcus has consulted or worked with many corporations, including 3M, Corning, Excel Energy, Medtronic, General Mills, and IBM. He was involved in a multinational research project sponsored by the NSF involving companies in the United States, Finland, Israel, and India. He did a sabbatical year at the MIT Sloan School in Boston. Prior to the joining Minnesota’s faculty, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School Of Business and was a research scientist at the Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle, Washington.