Master in Management of Technology

Autonomous technology systems are increasingly integrated at sea, on the ground, and in the air. As a technology manager, it is important to understand the technology itself and its potential for future competitiveness across various applications and domains such as maritime use, overland transportation, and unmanned aircrafts like drones.

In this course, the student will obtain the competences of assessing technology components and their maturity as well as developing plans for value creation and value capture for firms utilising autonomous technology systems.

Moreover, the student will gain the competence of combining technical insights with commercial aspects related to opportunities and barriers of increased autonomy to be able to develop strategic decisions for increased use of the technology.

The course is offered in collaboration with SIMAC (Svendborg International Maritime Academy). Please notice that no prior experience with autonomous technology systems is needed to participate in the course. 

See the formal course description.

Emerging technologies are characterised by radical novelty and the opportunity for relatively fast growth but also by uncertainty and ambiguity, as the application opportunities are perhaps only vaguely visible and the potential to harvest the value is therefore merely a distant promise.

This entails that bringing new products or services based on emerging technology to market is accompanied by concerns regarding where the market might be, how big it potentially is, and if it is ready for the new solution.

This course zooms in on efforts needed throughout the innovation process to successfully orchestrate the commercialisation of products or services that are based on emerging technology.

The student will obtain the competences to assess the opportunities and barriers to successful commercialisation at various levels and in different environments of a business as well as to outline a commercialisation strategy in the context of emerging technologies.

In addition, the student will gain understanding of the importance of complementary technology and product-service system configuration.

Sources of competitive advantage are deeply rooted in the value creation process and the growth potential that is given in a competitive environment.

Firms operating in an innovative and technology-driven environment are particularly forced to understand sources of competitive advantage to build competitive strategies.  

In this course, the student will gain the competence of assessing internal resources and firm-level factors and relating them to the competitive situation and the markets in a firm’s external environment.

In addition, the student will acquire the competences of assessing business situations as well as developing and implementing strategic interventions to improve business performance in real-world situations. 

See the formal course description.

Digitalisation of businesses and their products and services implies a complex transformation process revolving around implementation and integration of a set of technologies.

This is typically a significant change process affecting several parts of a company. It is therefore important for a technology manager to comprehend both opportunities and challenges connected with digitalisation as well as to understand the prerequisites for successful digital transformation.

In this course, the student will obtain the competences to outline potential optimisation of internal processes, point to innovation opportunities based on digitalisation of processes, products, and services as well as consider how to utilise data from digitalisation to create value to the company.

Knowledge of sustainability in an innovation and technology-driven context is important for technology managers. Key to working strategically with sustainability is knowledge about what sustainability is, how it relates to specific company challenges, and what the room for strategic operation is.

This course will therefore offer insights into how a firm’s ambitions for enhanced sustainability can be lifted through innovation. The student will acquire the competences of assessing, selecting, and applying sustainability principles to specific innovation challenges and to identifying how these may result in enhanced sustainability.

Moreover, the student will obtain the competences of valuing sustainability efforts – i.e., SDGs, green engineering principles, EU’s Ecodesign Directive, and circular economy in relation to products and services – as well as considering strategic dependencies.

Protecting the value created by technological innovations from imitation by competitors is a vital aspect of technology management. Creating value through technology is one thing but ensuring that the economic value stays with the inventors, who have invested in the technology, is quite another.

In this course, the student will gain the competences of drafting intellectual property contracts as well as obtaining the skills of analysing intellectual property issues and understanding complex legal problems.

Furthermore, the student will study practical issues arising in the commercialisation of intellectual property.

Users, customers, external stakeholders, as well as the general public are examples of market constituents that are part of the broader social environment surrounding innovative technologies.

In this course, the student will gain the competences of identifying and investigating the relevant market constituents to create market insights that can guide the development of marketing strategy for technology-based offerings.

Moreover, the student will obtain a foundational understanding of how technologies are embedded in social practices that structure the flows of daily life, and how technologies gain social acceptance and become legitimised in specific social environments.

In addition, the student will sharpen his or her research skills by learning how to work with interpretive research methods such as interviews, focus groups, and digital ethnography.

Robotics, drones, Internet of Things, industrial digital twins, and AI are examples of emerging technologies that can be used for adding value in a production setting or in a firm’s products and services. Such emerging technologies have the potential to change existing industrial and business systems, e.g., in the domains of manufacturing, transportation, and service operations.

In this course, the student will obtain a foundational understanding of a range of emerging technologies, including their maturity and interdependence, technology system opportunities, associated international standards, and business-related aspects such as cost.

Moreover, the student will gain an overview of methods and tools for economic, sustainability, and risk assessment that can be applied for industrial and business systems when planning the implementation of emerging technologies.

See the formal course description.

Some organisational structures and forms foster technological innovation while others act as a barrier to innovation. To implement business strategies in innovative and technology-driven industries, it is crucial to understand how organisation design influences the integration of tasks, employee motivation, innovative outcomes, as well as financial performance.

In this course, the student will obtain the competence of assessing trade-offs associated with the design and adaptation of cooperation and coordination in teams, departments, business units, and larger structures.

The student will further gain the competences of designing and developing an efficient organisation to facilitate technological innovation and strategic positioning.

Technology-based product development and innovation can be seen as a driver of competitive advantage of a company and is therefore an important focus area in relation to technology management. The core process of product development and innovation typically consists of several stages and iterations and includes a range of activities and stakeholders, both internally in the company and externally.

In this course, the student will gain foundational understanding of the core concepts centred around decision-making, organising of teams, processes, and activities, and involvement of stakeholders for maximising the chances of successful innovation.

The student will obtain the competences to lay the foundation for the process, formulate initiatives to reduce potential barriers to innovation, and develop plans for managing the necessary activities and stakeholders at different stages of the product development and innovation process.

See the formal course description.

Technological change often causes changes in markets with the potential to affect the strategies, marketing activities, and internationalisation processes of technology-oriented firms. In addition, value chains oftentimes need to be reconfigured when confronted with changes in established markets or with the emergence of new industries.

In this course, the student will acquire the competences of managing marketing-related challenges and opportunities associated with products and services that are based on known and emerging technologies. Moreover, the student will gain the competence of developing market insights derived from the use of quantitative market research in an empirical setting.

Technology management-related processes are frequently organised as projects. Moreover, projects are often managed in portfolios of projects. In this course, the student will gain the competences of contributing to managing projects in a technology management context.

Furthermore, the student will acquire the skills of dealing with complexity and uncertainty in relation to project management. Regarding the challenge of selecting and allocating resources to projects, the student of this course will obtain the competences of contributing to managing project portfolios.

Technology management-related challenges typically need to be systematically addressed and must be solved in a way that establishes a valid and reliable foundation for decision-makers. In this course, the student will work in depth with a relevant and practice-oriented problem from the student’s own work context.

The student will obtain the competences of independently investigating and solving a technology management-related challenge by applying theories and methods from a combination of the courses in the programme. Doing this project is an opportunity to obtain methodological knowledge and skills that can be applied in the later Master Project.

The student will gain the competences of including theory of science, working with methods of collecting and analysing data, and subsequently communicating the results, prerequisites, and limitations of the research as well as the relations to the programme’s theoretical foundation and technology management practice.