Technology Assessment: A Framework for Identification of Causalities Among Internal and External Modes of Technology Acquisition

Many firms gain new technologies and capabilities needed to maintain or enhance their competitiveness in today’s rapid technological advancements. It is most noted that many of these companies may choose to acquire them from other firms, rather than relying on internal development or other mechanisms like alliances (Kozin and Young, 1994). Technology acquisition plays a key role in the management of technology in industrial organizations (Durrani et al., 1998). It is believed that many developing countries are trying to bridge the development gap by means of technology acquisition (Castells, 1996). It is noted that a primary driver of many acquisitions resides also on the desire to obtain valuable resources, including technologies and capabilities possessed by the target firms. This motive appears to have increased in relative importance in the most recent wave of acquisition activity (Ranft and Lord, 2002). Though the number and value of acquisitions surged across a wide variety of industries during the 1990s, acquisition activity rose dramatically in high-technology sectors such as software, telecommunications, networking, electronics, information services, and biotechnology (Sikora, 2000). The term “acquisition” refers to all the stages from buying, introducing, applying, adopting, adapting, localizing, and developing through to diffusion (Joham and Pradham, 2006). The acquisition issue is multifaceted for various reasons including large variety of organization applications, rapid change in new technology, and involvement of several business entities in the organization. The set of processes for the build, lease, or buy decision must be identical for every instance or business opportunity that arises. The processes determine the strategic value and potential savings of the proposed project, as well as factors like business transformation versus drive for competitive strategies (Chan, 2005). Well-established literatures on technology acquisition framework highlight this very fact that the technology acquisition by its nature can be regarded as a multivariate discipline which indeed has received many considerations and recognitions from different theoretical and practical research backgrounds (Wamae, 2006; Kumar et al., 2004; Ahmed and Sahinidis, 2008). Then the result of this outlook is provision of a stream which enables practitioners and academics to identify and realize different kind of relationships and relationships could be existed and found among multiple perspectives and components of management of technology in organization (Ranft and Lord, 2002; Cassiman and Veugelers, 2002). Also, at the macroeconomic level of analysis, particularly in developing countries, technology acquisition plays a pivotal role to study the growth strategies pursued in the countries and to overview the market expansion or failures among them. It is argued that the most important market failures were those affecting the process of learning how to use new technologies in different sectors (Khan, 2009; Kozin and Young, 1994).