TENTATIVE SYLLABUS

B AD 84285

COURSE OBJECTIVES

This is a doctoral seminar aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of the modern management of high technology and automation.  It builds on your earlier courses in strategic theory.  These have provided you with some insight into the contemporary trends in advanced strategic theory.  You have already been exposed to the Resource-Based View (RBV), the emerging theories of Real Options (RO) and of Dynamic Capabilities (DC), strategic optimization and Constraint Theory (CT), and dealing with uncertainty through Scenario-Driven Planning (SDP).  You have taken courses in Economics, Information Technology (IT) and Operations Management (OM); and have had some exposure to Organization Theory (OT) and its interface with economic theory (Transaction-Cost Economics or TCE).

            However, you haven’t yet been confronted with a challenge such as having to derive a theoretical solution to a practical issue – in this case, to devise a mode of managing for the future.  By and large, this means reflecting on the salient issues of the management of high-tech and of automation.

COURSE PROCEDURE         

I expect you to be active participants in this seminar, in that not only will you contribute to finding references and arguments to support deriving solutions to questions I would pose, but also you will actively participate to posing the (research) questions and designing the solution process to be undertaken.

            To complement the treatment of the factors of production you have seen in Micro-Economics, we will not immediately immerse ourselves in mathematical abstractions, but take stock of what seems to be the major management problems of our times:

1.      In the past those who “reverse-engineered” and copied the technology without undertaking the trouble and expense of the basic research seemed to come out ahead financially; thus the industrially laggard were able to gradually catch up.  No longer. Underdeveloped corporations, regions or societies seem nowadays to be stuck going the wrong way on a moving sidewalk….

2.      On the other hand, the situation of those in the lead is also becoming less felicitous: from their point-of-view, technology is rapidly becoming a commodity that no longer confers competitive advantage!

The simultaneous existence of both these predicaments is a puzzle, and hence an intellectual challenge.  Complicating all this is the fact that the “march of progress” has become so fast-paced that the true bottleneck may no longer be technology itself, but the human ability to absorb it – hence all the fuss in some management journals about the psychological notion of absorptive capacity.

Where there’s room for attempting to optimize, and hence room for theorizing, is that absorptive capacity is not binary, not a yes-no affair, but a matter of degree.  History is replete with examples (can you think of any?) of instances, mostly taking place during the changeover from an older to a newer technology, in which able use of the old technology gave a greater competitive advantage than the maladroit use of the newer technology or procedure.

What to make of all these tendencies, trends and counter-trends?  This is the important question to which this research seminar will attempt to generate a jointly arrived at answer.

GRADING

There will be joint meetings of all students with the instructor on Fridays at 11:00 am to 2:00pm in A402 BSA.  However, individual consultation will continue by telephone or e-mail throughout the week, including weekends.  Not only are the students allowed to critique and contribute, they are expressly invited to do so through a class participation grade to reward the seekers of deeper connections (20% of the grade).

The general format of this seminar is that, in groups of two, the participating students will write two papers.  The first, somewhat shorter paper (30% of the grade), will sketch out the arguments that the final, more substantive and polished paper will develop more effectively (50% of the grade).  The two students in each team may also evaluate each other’s contribution.

COURSE MILESTONES

The timing milestones of the course will be discussed and established during our initial planning sessions.

REFERENCE LIST

Because this is a research seminar, the list of references is not predetermined, but will be developed jointly as we progress, based on an initial list I will give you during our first meeting.  After that, it will be augmented by suggestions coming from any of us.