Procedures to assess the technology level of a product and the learning mechanism of a company | |
| Author | Tran Thi Phuong Trinh |
| Call Number | AIT Diss. no.SM-96-1 |
| Subject(s) | Technology Assessment Product management Technology Assessment Product management |
| Note | A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of doctor of philosophy |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | The construction industry is an essential contributor to the process of development. Typically it consumes 50-70 percent of the public investment, contributes 5-10 percent of the Gross National Product of developing countries. While creating critical impact on social and economic growth, the industry in many of these developing countries suffers from the problems of low level of technological development, lacks of skilled construction personnel, weaknesses in construction site managerial capability. Even in some countries which have significant international expansion in construction business, technological capabilities in many aspects have not reached competitive level. In effort to manage and develop the construction industry, governments in many developing countries have adopted various approaches which include contractor qualifying systems and supporting schemes. However, the nature of the current qualifying systems for selecting of firms to award large, high complexity projects or firms to be assisted in supporting schemes do not encourage the development of local companies which have to make long term investment to grow by progressively enhancing their technological capability. Hence, there exists a need to explicitly classify technological requirement of large and technical complex projects based on understanding technological capability of local industry. Also developing countries must have a framework for systematically assessing the capability accumulation process of local companies both for selecting deserving firms to be assisted in supporting schemes and for favoring them in their bidding for higher complexity projects. In this study an attempt has been made to meet these needs. Since any product and its production process are interrelated, consideration of both product and process complexities is necessary for proper assessment of technology requirement level of any production system. Hence, the suggested methodology to assess technology requirement level of a production system in this study consists of identifying attributes which characterize product complexity and process complexity, and using the Analytical Hierarchy Process Techniques (ARP) to quantify qualitative attributes and obtain weightage of every complexity attribute. The research identifies general product complexity attributes and process complexity attributes and presents the procedure for using ARP to quantify and combine both product and process complexities. With the proposed methodology complexity degree of each requirement of a new project can be assessed in relation to those of previous projects which were carried out by local companies. Thus, extent of additional technological requirements of any new project can be explicitly assessed based on local companies' capability. The suggested methodology is then illustrated in a case study of four embankment dams in Thailand. Besides, it has long been recognized that, unlike technology asset, technological capability of a firm can not be traded in the market but progressively accumulated by the learning process of the firm itself Thus, assessing accumulation process of a firm on a certain technological capability means that assessing organizational learning of the firm on that specific technological activity. There are factors which create and influence the process of organizational learning. Identify these factors and their interrelationships provide a basic 11 framework to assess the learning process of a firm in its technological activities. The basic factors which govern the learning process of a firm for enhancing a particular technological capability include: a shared learning goal or aspiration level for the concerned technological activity, the top management1 s beliefs and principles, the management systems, and the learning action modes. Intensiveness of learning action modes reflects the effort the organization has actually spent in learning activities. The effectiveness of such learning effort- that is, the extent such effort could contribute to enhancing the concerned capability - is controlled by two factors. One is the focus of the firm on the stated goal which can estimated by the degree of awareness and agreement on the goal and its priority by the firm1 s members. The other one is the interest the firm has in organization learning which can be estimated through assessing the extent the top management beliefs are learning conducive and the extent the management systems are learning support. Based on this premise, a function is suggested to integrate considerations of factors in the learning framework for measuring technological capability accumulation. Elements which characterize each of the above factors are identified and benchmarks ranking different degrees of learning goal focusing, learning conduciveness, learning support and learning intensiveness are determined. Where a company stands on these learning scales can be evaluated by comparing the firm1 s practices against benchmarks of each element. An index of learning effectiveness of the company then can be obtained by using the suggested function for integration of the above scores on individual elements. The overall learning index can be used to rank technological capability accumulation of a number of construction companies and based on that to select most promising firms for further support. On the other hand, the individual scores on each of major factors indicate what are the strength and weakness of each individual firm1 s learning process and hence enable these firms to efficiently modify their organized learning further. The applicability of the suggested methodology is illustrated in a case study which presents the procedure to estimate learning effectiveness of a construction company in Thailand. |
| Year | 1996 |
| Type | Dissertation |
| School | School of Management |
| Department | Other Field of Studies (No Department) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (Publication code = DBA-SM, SM) |
| Chairperson(s) | Sharif, Nawaz;Sharif, Nawaz; |
| Examination Committee(s) | Baba, Keizo;Ramanathan, K.;Hertzberg, Ellen; |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Asian Institute of Technology; |
| Degree | Thesis (Ph.D.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1996 |