Wharton Chapter 4

Chapter four centers it's message around the story of AquaPharm Technologies Corporation, and the different components involved in assessing emerging technologies. Assessing emerging technologies involves four components: Scoping, Searching, Evaluating, and Committing. In scoping the company aligns their strategic intent and their capabilities with the technology they wish to explore. There are many considerations to explore when in the scoping stage, including the target market, financing, R & D options, and organizational culture. Searching includes exploring the different avenues of how and what technologies a company is going to pursue. The company will explore various obvious literature and public information, as well as even private and borderline un-ethical avenues to create a pool of candidate technologies. From the pool of candidate technologies, and select few are chosen for what I perceive to be the most important assessment step: Evaluation. Time or specifications spared at this step could lead to expensive and unnecessary failures of the technology if it goes to market. At this step, the company assesses the various risks involved with the technology. The newer the technology, the more risky it becomes. Once a technology is ultimately decided on, the final step, Commitment, takes place. This is the step where the company chooses a path it will use to introduce the product to market using a variety of strategic intents including: Wait and Watch (not actively develop the product, but actively keep an eye on the technology and/or market), Position and Learn (keeping an option open to develop the technology, and further pursue learning about it), Sense and Follow (active commercialization, but not be first-to-market), and Believe and Lead (full commitment and no fear being first-to-market). Throughout the chapter the different stages are exampled by the story of AquaPharm and their decisions at each step of the assessing process. In their efforts to consistently secure investment capital, they took on more than they could handle, and learned some expensive lessons for their lack of completion of thorough evaluation of technologies. The company ultimately failed and the end of the chapter revealed they may have been a success if they had assessed their technology and their market (their core market, had they focused on it, ultimately became successful) the company would most likely be alive and successfully operating today.