Sustaining industry leadership through technology strategy dimensions

Abstract

Strategic management is inter alia a process of managing a companys relationship with the environment. A critical concern of this discipline is optimising returns to the companys stakeholders over the long term. This means sustaining performance by balancing strategic investments in technology with short-term profitability. The main purpose of this study was to investigate technology strategies in widespread use in technology intensive industries and to explore their relationship to company performance. A non-probability, judgment sample of companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) were taken. The study makes a contribution to the field of strategic management research by integrating the dimensions of several previous studies, to derive a more comprehensive taxonomy of technology strategy archetypes. Two distinct technology factors obtained with the analysis were proved to positively influence the company performance dimensions and were classified as product development intensity and technology focus factors. The results show that strategy choices can significantly affect company performance. It thereby indicates which of the underlying dimensions have the strongest relationship with company performance. From an industry perspective, the greatest significance of these findings may be that they accentuate the importance of technology policy in strategic management. The substantial differences in performance associated with the dimensions do not necessarily indicate that a given company should choose a particular technology strategy, but rather indicates that technology policy decisions may have a substantial leverage on a companys performance and should be analysed and exercised with care and deliberation.