Global competitiveness with an engineering and technology management focus

The broad relationship between management systems and business systems is described, and a framework is proposed to represent their interaction with the global environment. Within the framework, innovation moves from improving mainstream business performance to entering new streams; either action is the beginning of the commercialization process. Commercialization capability is measured in four dimensions: time to market; range of markets; number of products; and breadth of technologies. It is concluded that engineering managers must be able to sustain a continuing modification and improvement of current practice to ensure its continual effectiveness and efficiency in the face of new customer/user or vendor/supplier requirements and emerging environmental and business threats.<>