The relationship between new technologies and strategic activities

Abstract

While ‘new technology’ and ‘strategy’ are pervasive and foundational to this journal's inquiry, each term is filled with ambiguity. This paper seeks to extend our understanding by developing a model relating technology to strategy. The model is a two-by-two frame based on the distinction between ‘planned’ vs ‘emergent’ strategy and ‘latent’ vs ‘sensible’ technology. The frame generates four distinct domains that we label ‘development’, ‘capitalisation’, ‘creation’ and ‘cultivation’. The paper then considers the ‘creation’ quadrant through a case history of the stent industry. This case indicates that (a) new technologies lack the ‘revolutionary’ characteristic with which they are normally associated; (b) that the courthouse rather than the marketplace is an important if not primary domain where new technology firms compete; and (c) that new technology firms are much more aggressive when interacting with other new technology firms than they are with firms from the existing industry.

Keywords:

• new technology
• strategy
• stent industry

Notes

Information describing the history of stent and related technology, and the current activities in the industry, comes from a wide variety of sources including company websites (e.g. www.medtronic.com), books (e.g. Rodengen 2001), industry organisations (e.g. European Medical Technology Industry Association, www.eucomed.be), commercial newspapers (e.g. Healthcare Purchasing News Online, www.hpnonline.com), journals (e.g. Medical Device Link, www.devicelink.com), regulatory bodies (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, www.fda.gov), oversight bodies (e.g. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, www.nhlbi.nih.gov) and academic databases such as ScienceDirect and EICompendex.