The importance of understanding technology management in B2B business networks.

1. Understanding Technology in
Business Networks
Overview

2. Introduction
• Companies are likely to need an
increasingly wide range, of know-how,
skills, abilities or technologies in order to
provide the offerings that their customers
need.
• The cost to the company of developing
its technologies is likely to increase with
each new generation of offerings.
• The rate of technological change outside
the company is accelerating and
competitors are engaged in a desperate
race to introduce new technologies into
their operations and offerings.

3. Introduction
• New competitors often arrive in established
industries. Using innovative technologies that have
been used in quite different applications.
• Companies cannot afford to develop and maintain
in their own company all the skills and
technologies that they need for their offerings.
• A countries patent output is an indicator of
innovation and competitive position in the global
economy.

4. International Patenting Output
The U.S.A leading patenting outputs and has a excellent
innovation base for future growth.

5. Technology in a Company
Three tasks:
1. Acquire technology
2. Exploit
3. Manage

6. Figure 1.0 Tasks in technology
External – License – In
Contract Research
Neither Hire Staff
Internal – R & D Joint Venture
Reverse Engineering
ACQUISITION
MANAGEMENT
EXPLOITATION
Internal – own External –
offerings and Lincense – Out
processes Joint Venture

7. Acquire Technology
Companies have three alternative ways of
acquiring technology:
• Internal acquisition
• External acquisition
• Don’t acquire the technology

8. Exploit Technology
• Internal Exploitation
– Companies exploiting their own technologies.
• External Exploitation
– Companies exploit its technologies by selling
them to others by license or turn key.

9. Managing Technology
• Commercialise new technologies
• Transferring technologies
• Developing and implementing policies for
technology exploitation

10. Examining Technology
A company’s technologies can be separated into
two broad types:
1. Product technologies
– Provide the ability to design a particular type of
offering. i.e. McDonald could apply the same
technology to design a pizza
2. Process technologies
– Provide the ability to produce or fulfill an offering, on
time, in the right place to the right specification, at the
right price and do this consistently. i.e. McDonalds
developed a scoop to stack French fries.
A combination of product and processes is always needed.

11. Example 1
• Many retailers specify the design (product
technology) of the offerings that they wish to
buy and manufacturing methods (process
technologies) that will be used to produce
the offerings.

12. Example 2
• A company may design an offering (product
technology), but either by choice or
necessity it may rely on another company
with the appropriate process technology to
manufacture it.

13. Basic and distinctive technologies
• Basic technologies
– technologies a company depends on and
without could not operate in a particular
network.
• Distinctive technologies
– Technologies that are seen “special
by customers and is a source of competitive
advantage.

14. The technology adoption cycle
Source – Adopted from Moore 1991

15. Technology and Networks
• A network consists of companies, each having a
different product and process technologies.
• A combination of the technologies from many
companies is needed to provide an offering that
will meet the needs of the end-consumer.
• Relationships between companies in a network
enable this process to take place.

16. Technology and Networks
• Stability and change
• Adapting to the network
• The company’s own developments
• Relating to developments elsewhere
• Technology development between customer and
supplier

17. Technology in Relationships
• Relationships act as pipelines bringing
technologies of two companies together.
• They create the frame within which technological
development takes place.
• They become a technological resource for the two
companies.

18. Innovation can be defined as
New Ideas + action or implementation which
results in an improvement, gain, or profit

19. Evolutionary & Strategic
Technology Management
Strategic Evolutionary
planning Model
What Industry do we want to build?
What market segment or application?
What are the enabling technologies?

20. Three Types Of Innovation
Product
Modification
Explicit
Customer End Users’
Needs Unarticulated
Breakthrough Needs
Research
Type A: New Market or Industry

21. Three Types Of Innovation
Product End Users
Modification
Breakthrough
Research
Explicit
Customer
Needs
Type B: Changing the Basis of Competition

22. Three Types Of Innovation
End Users
Product
Modification
Explicit
Customer
Needs
Type C: Line Extension

23. Summary
• Business marketers need an appreciation of the issues that
their companies face in technology.
• A company’s technologies are its prime assets.
• Relationships are essential to exploit and develop
technology.
• Technology is essential if a relationship is to have any
value to a customer and supplier
• Business marketers need an appreciation of the issues that
their companies face in technology.
• A company’s technologies are its prime assets.
• Relationships are essential to exploit and develop
technology.

24. Summary
• A company’s technology is the total sum of all that exists
“between the ears” of its staff.
• Technology includes patented designs of physical products
and services and complex operating systems.
• It also includes how to put offerings together that will solve
customer problems.
• Business marketers must have a clear idea of the
technologies they really have, both product and process.
• Finally, when a customer takes a decision to buy an
offering from a supplier it is doing so because it believes
that the supplier has the ability to design, develop and fulfill
an offering that will solve a particular problem.

25. You are welcome to contact Nigel Bairstow at B2B
Whiteboard your source of B2B Asia / Pacific
marketing advice
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/nigel-bairstow/6/41b/726
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