DEFINING ELEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT

Technology management combines engineering, scientific and managerial disciplines in planning, development and introduction of technological capability with reference to the elaboration and implementation of the strategic and operative goals of an organization (National Research Counsil, US 1987) The short, less bureaucratic and widely used version of this definition merely states that technology management is the implementation of technological conversion from one level to another. A Danish centre of technology management studies, recently established in collaboration between the Technical University and the Copenhagen Business School is operating on a conceptual basis which is emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity in technology management research, thus searching for ways of combining the scientific paradigms of the two participating environments. In technological research the focus is increasingly upon the different ways in which narrow technical problems are integrated with ecological, societal and social conditions and changes. The challenge has up till now mainly been to comprehend such "external" conditions in the technical designs and furthermore through the organisation of institutional frameworks to provide incentives for firms to incorporate these conditions in their decisions on technology. In business economy research, however, the focus has lately rather been upon technology as a new knowledge resource, possessing radically different qualities from traditional economic resources. Some authors have even seen this as a reason for reformulating central areas of the business economic disciplines (e.g. Kreiner & Mouritsen 1992) In their logical conclusions the technical-scientific assignment is to develop better technical solutions under new ecological, societal and business economic conditions, while the business economic assignment is to develop better firms and management tools under new economic conditions. Even though this contrast might, to a certain degree, seem artificial it is also appropriate in order to specify the interdisciplinary assignment: the relationship between the two perspectives, "technology as solutions" and "technology as a ressource", is dialectical. Maintaining and refining this dialectic is exactly what the interdisciplinary technology management research should be doing, thus avoiding purely undialectical and one dimensional understandings like, for instance, the subordination of technical ambitions under the rationalism of a business logic, or like the blindness to business economic realities in a technical fascination.