What's New?

• August 28, 2008: New page, based on last year's, set up. Very rudimentary. Main point: Go see the Wiki.

Course overview

Prerequisites:  or equivalent courses or knowledge as determined by the instructor.

Areas that will be covered may include:

• technology evolution and technology history
• disruptive and sustaining technologies
• entering new markets with technology
• linking strategy and innovation
• building strategic innovation capability
• technology market structure and evolution
• componentization and integration
• industry structures and competitive environments in eBusiness
• electronic markets and market facilitators
• technology implementation and institutionalization

Administrivia

• Christensen, C. M.and M. Raynor (2003). The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston, MA, Harvard Business School Press. (two chapters were required reading for GRA6821, so students should have some familiarity with it already)."Innovation fails because companies unwittingly strip the disruptive potential from ideas before they ever see the light of day". This is the followup book to The Innovator's Dilemma, a great book summarizing Christensen's research since the first book, with excellent examples of when and how technologies can be made to be disruptive - as well as a torrent of highly relevant for any manager wanting to do strategy in technology-rich industries.
• Shapiro, Carl & Hal R. Varian (1999) Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, McGraw-Hill/Harvard Business School Press (required reading for GRA6821, so students should be familiar with it already). (For more information, check out the dedicated Web site at http://www.inforules.com/. You can also read the first chapter here.) In the words of The Economist: "These two Berkeley professors bring a discipline to their analysis that is usually quite absent from the overheated burblings of the cyberprophets... [This book is about] rigorous and practical strategies, based on solid foundations, for surviving and prospering in the network economy. [...] what is so likeable about this book--its fairmindedness and its wise pragmatism."

• Utterback, J. M. (1994). Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press (required reading for GRA6821, so students should be familiar with it already). Utterback is a professor at MIT and a pioneer in the field of technology evolution. This book describes the process of technology evolution in a number of industries, from computer chips to a fabulous chapter on the ice industry (where Norway was a very important player on the world market.) A theoretically robust model for technology evolution as a process of evolution and revolution is detailed, a model which is crucial for our understanding of the likely changes we are facing in our increasingly digital business world. This book offers the theoretical weight necessary to put the companies and technologies we study into a broader context.
• Christensen, Clayton M. (1997) The Innovator's Dilemma: Why New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
  In this impressively researched book focusing on the hard disk drive industry, Clayton Christensen shows how listening to the customer and giving the customer what they want can get a company in trouble when the technology changes, even though the change may, at the time, seem technologically insignificant. A scary book for technology executives, definitely something that should have been read by IBM, Norsk Data, Digital, Wordperfect, Prime, Data General, Bull, ICL and other former greats of information technology.
• Friedman, Thomas (2005): The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux. This is a bestseller on the "second wave" of globalization (you might want to look into Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree for a breathless description of the first wave) that has formed many Americans' view of the world. Great examples and an enthusiastic and well-informed style - though the examples are very well known, the viewpoints are refreshing and the scope wide. Entertaining reading. (For a more thorough review and a summary of the contents, see Espen's blog entry. For a pointer to a good critique, see here.)

• MIT's Technology Review magazine
• Ray Kurzweil's web site where you can also sign up for a newsletter with some of the more ambitious technology directions of the day
• Slashdot, a lively discussion list for nerds - if you want to spread the word fast, this is the place to do it
• Edge, a hangout for the self-confessed (and self-appointed) digerati
• Rafe Needleman's column on new and interesting technology startups. This is the stuff read by people who finance startups.
• Wired, Fast Company or Business 2.0, technology magazines with lots of fluff and occasional great feature articles, though losing steam since the dot-com boom subsided.

• Term paper (50%): Term papers are to be handed in, in Blackboard and in the usual fashion, no later than (time to be announced later). Done in groups of 2-3 students. Topics will be discussed in class - but, of course, technology and strategy should be prominent.
• Class participation (25%): Determined by course instructor based on quantity and quality of discussion and preparation during classes. All students should use name tags (if you lose yours, there is a template to create one in Blackboard) and sit at the same place in the classroom during all course sessions.
• Individual written assignments (25%): To be delivered during the course.Details later.

Detailed seminar plan (MOVED!!!! Try the course wiki for more information)