Coupling of technology management and strategic planning processes: the state of the art

Summary form only given. This research is the result of a particularly productive and unusual partnership between academics and practitioners and is part of an ongoing research program where many of the concepts and frameworks continue to evolve. With the cooperation of a consortium, the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences (NCMS), a half-dozen large technology-oriented organizations have been participating in the research, providing information through numerous site visits and dozens of interviews. In addition to this traditional data gathering effort, however, the research program has benefited from having key participants from the organizations provide critiques and refinements to the process-based framework as it emerged from the fieldwork and from the literature. The researchers and practitioners working on this study jointly identified a large number of technology management processes as part of an overall framework for the management of technology. This framework is based on a process-based view of organizations, where a process is defined as a set of related activities or routines. For each process within this overall framework, the authors have developed as part of the research effort: a brief description; key issues related to the process; potential best practices; ways in which academics or practitioners have tried to measure the process; relationships to other processes; and references to the literature.