Analysis and Design of a Strategic Technology Development Program for Small Scale Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

In today s competitive business environment, global competition is forcing companies to perpetually seek ways to improve their products and services. Technological changes and demanding customers are creating a more knowledge intensive, turbulent, complex, and uncertain environment. The intense competition requires that firms excel simultaneously in several areas without trade-off, including innovativeness and responsiveness to their customers. These formidable changes have forced the organizations around the world to adopt innovative and state of the art strategies to suitably address the all-important issues of organizational growth and excellence. It is high time that industries wake up and gear up for research initiatives to develop cutting edge technologies. Amongst the several problems faced by small scale manufacturing organizations in the country, technology obsolescence is one major predicament. There has been a lack of any organized attempt to understand how technology upgradation activities are being carried out in the Indian small scale sector. The objective of present research work is to analyze the indigenous technology development capabilities of small scale manufacturing industry and develop a strategic technology development program for the same. The work has been carried out under the overall framework of Flexible Systems Methodology . The research problem has been conceptualized as a SAP-LAP (Situation-Actor-Process; Learnings-Action-Performance) paradigm. In this framework, the situation aspect comprises of the present industrial situation in small scale manufacturing sector, whereas manufacturing organizations constitute the actor aspect. The role of in-house research and innovation initiatives in building technological capabilities constitutes the process . The work has been carried out in four distinct phases.