The Nature of Technology

The more high-tech technology becomes, the less purely rational becomes the business of dealing with it. Entrepreneurship in advanced technology is not merely a matter of decision making. It is a matter of imposing a cognitive order on situations that are repeatedly ill-defined. Technology thinker John Seely Brown tells us that “management has shif

The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components.

Viewed this way, a technology is more than a mere means. It is a programming of phenomena for a purpose. A technology is an orchestration of phenomena to our use.

I have been stressing that every solution in the form of a new technology creates some new challenge, some new problem. Stated as a general rule, every technology contains the seeds of a problem, often several. This is not a “law” of technology or of the economy, much less one of the universe. It is simply a broad-based empirical observation—a regr

The economy, in a word, is becoming generative. Its focus is shifting from optimizing fixed operations into creating new combinations, new configurable offerings. For the entrepreneur creating these new combinations in a startup company, little is clear. He often does not know who his competitors will be. He does not know how well the new technolog

In the generative economy, management derives its competitive advantage not from its stock of resources and its ability to transform these into finished goods, but from its ability to translate its stock of deep expertise into ever new strategic combinations. Reflecting this, national wealth derives not so much from the ownership of resources as fr

The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose.

We now have a more direct description of technology than saying it is a means to a purpose. A technology is a phenomenon captured and put to use. Or more accurately I should say it is a collection of phenomena captured and put to use. I use the word “captured” here, but many other words would do as well. I could say the phenomenon is harnessed, sei

I have had to make some decisions in the writing of this book. For one, I decided to write it in plain English (or what I hope is plain English). I am a theorist by profession and nature, so I have to admit this has caused me some horror. Writing a book about serious ideas for the general reader was common a hundred or more years ago, but today it