Disruptive technologies create growth in the industries they penetrate or create entirely new industries through the introduction of products and services that are dramatically cheaper, better, and more convenient. These disruptive technologies often disrupt workforce participation by allowing technologically unsophisticated individuals to enter and become competitive in the industrial workforce. Disruptive technologies offer a revolutionary change in the conduct of processes or operations.Disruptive technologies can evolve from the confluence of seemingly diverse technologies or can be a result of an entirely new technological investigation. Existing planning processes are notoriously poor in identifying the mix of sometimes highly disparate technologies required to address the multiple performance objectives of a particular niche in the market. For a number of reasons, especially the inability to look beyond short-term profitability, and the risk/return tradeoff of longer term projects, it is suggested that current strategic planning and management processes promote sustaining technologies at the expense of disruptive technologies.We propose a systematic approach to identify disruptive technologies that is realistic and operable and takes advantage of the text mining literature. This literature-based discovery process is especially useful in identifying potential disruptive technologies that may require the input from many diverse technological and management areas. We believe that this process holds great potential for identifying projects with a higher probability of downstream success. Further, we suggest a process to take the identified potential disruptive technology from the "idea stage" through to the development of a potentially feasible product for the market. This second stage makes use of workshops and roadmapping to codify the ideas of technological and management experts, who were identified in the literature-based discovery stage. Our goal is to describe and explain the pragmatic steps suggested by our innovative and practical process.The proposed process could identify technologies whose eventual development and application to specific problems would generate innovative products. The goal is to isolate technologies that have the potential to redefine an industry, or alternatively, have the potential to create an entirely new industrial setting. Use the text-mining component of literature-based discovery to identify both the technical disciplines that are likely candidates for disruptive technological products, and experts in these critical technical and managerial disciplines. While we know that this is but one way to investigate nascent disruptive technologies we feel it is imperative that the representatives of these potentially critical technical disciplines are included in the roadmap development process, either as implementers or as consultants.Every firm is looking for "the next great thing". Literature-based discovery offers a starting point for identifying at least a portion of the major contributory technical and managerial disciplines necessary for potential disruptive technologies and discontinuous innovations. Combining literature-based discovery with a practical workshop/roadmap process dramatically enhances the likelihood of success. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.

Summary form only given. The increasing recognition that sophisticated management of knowledge is essential to maintaining competitive advantage suggests the importance for firm investment in strategic management development. This paper presents the argument that management development must be results oriented and closely linked to business goals such as competitiveness, disseminating common culture, and driving change. As a result, management development has become a force for not only improving the skills and knowledge but for overall organizational development. This paper discusses the role of management development programs in fulfilling the following criteria: improving management skills of technical managers; encouraging the technical managers from different disciplines to work together cross-nationally to share product and market information; helping firms define the role of the general manager in developing clear business objectives and performance measures in line with their missions and vision; and providing a mechanism for effective management networking and enhancement of professional interpersonal relationships. The discussion includes a review of the trends in management development, the links between management development and strategy, and role of managerial skills in gaining a sustained competitive advantage. The efforts of a multinational company to develop these skills in technical managers is highlighted

Government-sponsored manufacturing extension services, modeled after cooperative extension, have been established to provide technical and business assistance to small to medium sized manufacturers (SME). Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of SME has become a necessary diagnostic procedure for manufacturing extension services. One such assessment procedure, QuickView, has clearly demonstrated superior results as a preliminary diagnostic tool

This paper descibes an approach to the problem of evaluation in the public sector. The schema, called technology scanning, was developed during 1968 to create a research and development priority program for the State of Connecticut. In late 1969, a second major application was initiated in the Cohoes, New York, Model Cities program. The basis of technology scanning is a grid on which the problems or system's goals are arrayed against the solutions. The socio-economic importance of the goals and the effectiveness of the solutions in meeting these goals are rated by panels made up of the system's members ranging from technical experts to concerned citizens. The grid is then solved to produce a list of the most important solutions. These solutions are later evaluated against their projected contribution as described in the grid. The process may be repeated cyclically to allow programs to be replanned on an annual basis.