Assessing Innovations from the Technology Perspective

Technological change can have a major impact on organizations and their performance. It is also a key factor in understanding dynamic organizational capabilities. It is therefore critical to have a clear understanding of the nature of innovations. Assessing innovations in terms of technology means that we consider a product or service as the practical application of knowledge, especially because it uses technical processes or methods. This corresponds to the standard definition of “technology” found in today’s dictionaries. Since this definition applies to knowledge in general, the technological perspective is not exclusively reserved for products but can apply equally to services. Indeed, services are often the result of the application of science of a technical nature. This is clearly illustrated by web-based services such as web-shopping. But this is also the case with more traditional services; for example, a hair salon can be considered from the technical point of view as the use of tools, machines, techniques, and, more generally, know-how for delivering an applied benefit.