The Handbook of Technology and Innovation Management

Preface

When Rosemary Nixon, an editor for Blackwell Publishing, now part of John Wiley & Sons, approached me in 2003 to edit a Handbook on the Management of Technological Innovation, I quickly agreed. The field of management of technology had undergone major changes in the previous two decades, with an increased focus on technology strategy, entrepreneurship, and product development, and I thought that the time was right for a handbook that provided some order to the plethora of new arguments and findings. Moreover, many of the names associated with cutting edge research in this area were not leading scholars two decades earlier – frankly, many of them were not even scholars 20, or even 10, years before. And I thought that a book that collected their views and summaries of the field would be extremely useful to current scholars and Ph.D. students. Finally, I thought that it would be easy to put together this handbook and that it would be published within a year.

Maybe I should have thought a little more about this undertaking before agreeing to do it. Instead of taking one year, it has taken closer to five years. Unfortunately, we lost several authors due to personal issues and had to replace them with others, which upturned all plans to get the handbook out quickly. However, with the manuscript now complete, I can reflect upon the effort and conclude that I was right about the idea behind the book. The changes in the field demand this handbook, and bringing together the work ...