ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together three related themes: technology, the tools we use in order to do business; innovation, the process of improving business by making the business itself more efficient, offering new products and services to customers and so on; and knowledge, which as we shall see is an important prerequisite for both the use of technology and innovation. Today, technology management, innovation and knowledge management
all have their own literature and their own disciplines of study; many business schools offer separate courses on each. Each subject is complex and deserves to be studied intensively. But, as we have noted elsewhere in this book, this division into different disciplines can run the risk of developing the silo effect, in which each is studied and practised in isolation. The strong linkages between these three subjects need to be borne in mind. Managers in the past were well aware of the importance of all three.
Though the pace of technological change increased steadily from the late eighteenth century onward, technological advances had been occurring slowly but steadily for centuries. The progression from stone to bronze and then to iron tools, for instance, was a technological revolution in its own right, as was the efficient harnessing of water power in the Middle Ages. Each advance in technology saw innovations in terms of new products, new production processes, sometimes new industries and markets. And beyond these revolutions, progressive businesses were constantly engaged in the search for ways to improve, to go beyond what already existed, to put distance between themselves and their competitors. Similarly the importance of knowledge has long been recognised, even if its role was not clearly understood. The pace of change in all three fields picked up greatly during the Indus-
trial and Scientific Revolutions that began in the late eighteenth century, and even more so in the late twentieth century with the advent of the computer age. Our technologies are far more complex than those of earlier times, and we have much more knowledge at our disposal – although it is not yet clear if this has made us any more innovative! In some respects we are now glutted with both knowledge and technology, and many of us strive to make sense of
and use effectively the resources we have. Perhaps it is fairer to say that the face of innovation has changed. In former times, innovators made do with a limited amount of knowledge and technology: the contest was to see who could use these most effectively. Today the process has become more oriented towards pattern recognition: innovators look around at our complex world and search for things that they can use to create new products or new value.
We begin with a look at technology itself, how it has advanced and changed, and in particular how those changes have impacted on management. It should be emphasised that what follows is not a history of technology itself.
