Developing & Managing A Successful Technology & Product Strategy

In an environment of accelerating change, merely investing in new technologies is not enough to ensure your success. You need to ask, “How will we use...
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In an environment of accelerating change, merely investing in new technologies is not enough to ensure your success. You need to ask, “How will we use this technology to create market value? ”

Developing & Managing A Successful Technology & Product Strategy Making Profitable Project and Product Choices in Fast-Paced Markets and Technical Environments

“The program does more than get your creative juices flowing. It yanks you out of tactical planning and firefighting and into the strategic thinking space you didn’t know you missed.”

An Intensive Two-Day Program for Senior Technical and Corporate Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts December 3-4, 2009 March 24-25, 2010 September 13-14, 2010 December 2-3, 2010 http://mitsloan.mit.edu/execed

INSIDE: Earn an MIT Sloan Executive Certificate

Executive Education

Executive Series on Management, Innovation, & Technology

MIT Sloan

THE MIT SLOAN SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Translating Your R&D Budget Into Value and Profits 2

“No innovation, no technology, no new product is worth anything if it doesn’t create value.” Developing successful technologies and products is a problem which extends far beyond the R&D lab. Ask any head of research, manufacturing, engineering, project management, or new venture development who suddenly has the responsibility for bringing that product or technology to market.

they are linked, how technologies differ across markets, and what drives the acceptance of technology. You’ll learn a set of tools that will help you: • identify high-leverage projects for your research dollars • match products to market dynamics

Where do you begin? How do you decide which projects are most likely to succeed and which technologies to invest in? How do you marry critical technology choices with the right business choices?

• build technical capabilities to give you the right set of products to create the customer value you need • develop strategies to capture market value

Developing & Managing A Successful Technology & Product Strategy is an intensive, highly interac-

tive, two-day program for senior executives – from senior technical managers and general managers in technology-intensive organizations to marketing and business development executives in technology-producing organizations, to R&D managers in any organization – that details a unique and powerful approach to linking business and technology strategy, and developing profitable technologies and ventures. Earn an MIT Sloan Executive Certificate Senior executives and technical managers can earn a comprehensive MIT Sloan Executive Certificate in three important areas of management practice, including Management and Leadership, Strategy and Innovation, and Technology, Operations, and

Drawn from the Sloan School’s MBA curriculum, it provides a fundamental framework for helping you to understand how technologies and markets evolve, how

• change the organizational structure to reflect changing market and technical dynamics • get your organization to deliver on your strategy Who Should Attend: This is not an advanced or

doctoral level program. Rather, this program is for senior general and technical executives who make practical strategic decisions about the development, management, or marketing of technology and/or products, or the management of organizations in rapidly-changing markets, including: CEOs, Presidents, COOs, Executive VPs, heads of R&D, Engineering, Manufacturing & IS, Chief Technologists, Corporate Planners and Strategists, VPs of Marketing & New Venture Development, and senior managers with business development responsibility.

Value Chain Management.

Candidates must complete four executive education programs specified for the certificate selected within four years. (Credit for programs taken previously will be considered on request.) See our web site at http://mitsloan.mit.edu/execed for more information.

“The program does more than get your creative juices flowing. It yanks you out of tactical planning and firefighting and into the strategic thinking space you didn’t know you missed.” Michael Capsambelis, Director, Product Management, VIZ, a business of General Dynamics

“Sets a great foundation for re-thinking our relationship to strategy! Extremely thought-provoking.” Scott Dratch, Director, Technology Alignment, General Dynamics

In This Program You’ll Learn A Fundamental Analytic Framework . . . . . . that will help you more effectively link your organization’s technologies and products to the marketplace, and: Create Value Through Technology and New Product Development

• do a better job of choosing among promising technical opportunities and new product ideas • communicate the value of what your research organization is doing to the rest of the company

• use “barbed wire” approaches to protect new product investments • decide in advance of investing R&D dollars whether you’ll have sufficient intellectual property or complementary asset protection to keep your competition at bay • understand the difference between a great technology and a great technology through which you can move forward Get the Organization to Deliver the Value

• know when to jump ship – when to drop one technical approach and start another – or when to stay with a promising approach

• eliminate organizational mismatches that make it feel as though you can’t get anything done

• resolve make vs. buy decisions, and learn how to leverage value that other people have created

• evolve the organization to match the changing demands of the market

• balance fundamental long-term research with short-term research that delivers more immediate value

• manipulate incentives, culture, teams, and other key levers

• make the transition from lab to new product

• design your organization at the same time you’re designing your technology strategy

Capture the Value that Your R&D Efforts Have Created

• align organizational capability with technology strategy to achieve market success

• better manage your judgment about how the world is going to evolve and where to make technology bets

“Clear, concise and to the point. Will strongly recommend this as an augmentation to an MBA.” Janarthanan Venkataraghavan, Product Development Lead, Siemens Energy Services

“Engaging delivery and smart strategic take-aways.” Julie Oden, Product Manager, Yahoo! Canada

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About the Program

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What does it take to go from creating fundamental technical competence to making money? How do you make decisions about long-term technological capabilities when the products you build are a function of the long-term technologies, the customer value is a function of the products you introduce, and the profits you make are a function of the value that the customers find? Developing successful technology and product strategy involves more than just creating innovative new technologies. It means knowing which innovations to back. It means understanding the dynamics of market and technology change – and being able to locate yourself in the cycle. It means boxing out the competition. It means being organized to meet demand along the way. In this program you will learn to use a set of tools for portraying these strategic problems in a concrete, visual way, as well as for communicating complex relationships and issues to others in the organization, and for making choices simultaneously and dynamically in an uncertain world. I. Creating Value

No innovation, no technology, no new product is worth anything if it doesn’t create value. How do you develop new technology in a way that creates value for consumers? How do you link technology

to markets? In this section, you will learn about a fundamental framework for portraying the phases of investment – from invention and foment to takeoff to maturity to technological exhaustion – and for locating your technology, your company, and your industry at any given time in terms of their inherent maturity. You’ll discover how to use this framework to: • track the changing return on your R&D dollar over time • think about the relationship between resources in and performance out at the project, product, and broad technology approach levels You’ll also learn about a sequence of tools that will help you understand what’s going to drive acceptance of your technology, and to factor in: 1. The difference between great products and architectures: The difference in dynamics between markets where diffusion is determined either by the characteristics of the product or the size of the installed base. What drives those markets dominated by architectural dynamics? What is the advantage of the installed base, and how do you get to a critical installed base? 2. The dynamics of how markets change: As a product diffuses across a market over time, it is sold to different kinds of customers who need

“A strategy course that is highly relevant to the practical business environment and readily implemental in the business.” John Andrew, Chief Executive Officer, eiWorkflow Solutions, LLC

“This program was exactly what I was looking for. It took a solid theoretical foundation and provided the tools needed for real world application.” Scott Brown, Senior Engineering Manager, Medtronic, Inc.

different bundles of attributes (from lead users who could care less about a user’s manual to those who need a full service and support network). You’ll learn how diffusion dynamics differ in each of the four basic kinds of markets, what those markets are, and how to take account of those differences in developing your technology and product strategy. Is your market driven by different types of consumers or improving technology? Is the name of your game that you have to keep evolving the technology to meet new customer segments, or is it that you have to keep evolving the technology to hit one critical application better and better? 3. The dynamics of technical change: Technology strategies differ depending on how you view the market dynamics. In this segment, you’ll learn to identify the sources of new technology success in your market, as well as: • the dynamics of diffusion and technical change in your industry • the sources of technical change and how fast it’s going • what the technical parameters are in this market • whether you need to be making investments in research

II. Capturing Value

It’s not enough to have a great idea. If you’re going to spend your R&D dollars to develop products and technologies that customers want, you need to think about how to keep the competition from taking the market away from you. You cannot develop an effective research strategy independent of a strategy for capturing the value that your research creates. What are your options? In this segment, you will learn about two broad approaches for capturing the value that derives from new products and technologies: 1. Appropriability, or the MIT start-up strategy, where you control the knowledge so well that no one else can create the product. How do you think through an appropriability strategy and decide whether the project is best supported by intellectual property protection (e.g., patents, copyrights), speed (running so fast that no one will be able to duplicate your efforts in a particular time frame), and/or secrecy? 2. Complementary assets, where, if you can’t control knowledge that is core to the technology or product, you control things that are necessary to use the knowledge (e.g., manufacturing, distribution channels, advertising, brand name) without which you cannot go to market.

“Excellent state-of-the-art program for those dealing with technology integration – very useful inside analysis of success drivers.” Alvaro Quintana, M.D., Global Medical Strategy Leader, Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Services, LLC

“Highly introspective analysis on how best to approach the challenge of innovation that could be applied to a wide spectrum of industries.” Rodolfo Leon-Paez, Marketing and Sales, Penoles Metals & Chemicals, Inc.

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About the Program (continued)

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How do you identify and distinguish generic complementary assets from unique complementary assets that are particular to your own organization’s scenarios of how likely IT product and service developments will impact your business. III. Delivering Value

The organizational structure necessary to deliver value needs to be different at each stage of technology or product evolution. Yet few people think about designing their organizational strategies at the same time that they design their technology strategies.

When should you be more creative? When should you be more efficient? When should you organize by function? When does functional structure get in the way? How do you solve the problem of organizational lag, in which you’re stuck with the structure from the last stage and it is producing sub-optimal results? Why does it always feel that you can’t get anything done, and what can you do about it? How, by understanding why the organization is the way it is, you can make it easier to work inside the existing structure. IV. How to Organize To Do It

What strategies will help you move both your organization and your research at the same time?

About the MIT Sloan School Executive Series on Management, Innovation, & Technology The impact of technology on the corporation is being felt not only in terms of the products, processes, and services companies are able to design and market, but in the way organizations are being restructured and managed. For senior technical and corporate executives, staying abreast of the competition means staying abreast of the way technology is redefining the corporation. This is one in a series of interactive, executive-level programs that have been designed to help both technical and non-technical management succeed in an environment of accelerating technological change.

Choosing technology is easy! Choosing where your organization’s going and how rapidly you can evolve it is hard. How do you get your organization to deliver on your strategy? What dimensions can you manipulate? How do you think about what constraints your organizational context places on the strategy you can put into place? Why, if you can’t deliver, you shouldn’t go in that direction. We will discuss practical tools that will help you to deliver on your business strategy, as well as tools to help translate ideas into a viable technology strategy.

“I found great value throughout the entire course, specifically around creating and adding value and the ability to identify, manage, and evaluate worthy projects.” Brandon Rowe, Global Marketing, Nortel Networks

“An insightful look into struggles companies deal with when trying to take steps to transition into new and unknown areas. Great learning opportunity.” Rachel Halych, Program Manager, Stryker Biotech

Program Faculty

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan is Associate Professor

of Strategic Management and course head of the Core Strategy Department at the MIT Sloan School of Management. An economic sociologist with a focus on social network analysis, he studies how social structures of various kinds emerge and influence behavior and key outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. Zuckerman’s current research projects include a study of industry peer networks, exclusive groups of non-competing peer firms from the same industry that gather on a regular basis to learn from one another’s experiences and to motivate one another to achieve higher performance.

A Note About Team Attendance The program features important information about, and a common language for, developing effective technology and product strategies, and specific techniques for managing the process. It would be especially beneficial to attend with others from your technology and product development teams, as well as your counter-parts from technical or general management.

“The instructor is dynamic and knowledgeable. I wish I could take a 26-session class with her.” Barbara Wan, Director, Program Management, Genzyme Corporation

“You leave with a thorough understanding of what it takes to capture, create, and deliver value. This class shows the way.” Chris Musoke, Engineering Manager, The Boeing Company

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