The Entanglement of Technologies and R&D Management Practices
Jeremy Klein, Technologia Ltd and RADMA
Over the past few years I’ve run a track at the R&D Management Conference on the ‘Technology Dimension of R&D Management’. My intention was to start a discussion about the role of technologies in the formation of R&D management practices.
In the seminar I will describe a participant observation case study of an SME with a background of traditional manufacturing, but undertaking its first R&D project in additive manufacturing. I will explore whether the radical transition in manufacturing technologies led to an equivalent transition in the practices of R&D management.
Building on this empirical study, I have been developing a conceptual framework for how R&D management practices emerge as responses to deficiencies in extant methods when challenged by a new technology or context. I will use the examples of Technology Readiness Levels, Agile project management and Moore’s Law. Central to this discussion is the concept of ‘fit’ between a technology and an R&D management practice. The three examples suggest a common evolutionary process as follows: (i) a ‘Kuhnian crisis’ arising from a poor fit between technology and R&D management process; (ii) innovation of contextually-specific new practices; (iii) their integration and institutionalization, and (iv) diffusion of the new R&D management process to technologies and situations beyond their originating context.
The implications for management scholars are that greater salience should be given to the originating technological context of any new management theory or practice. Likewise, practitioners need to be aware of the need for fit between technologies and the R&D practices employed.