The Future of Technology Management and the Business Environment: Lessons on Innovation, Disruption, and Strategy Execution

Introduction

Technology is both the cause of many of the world’s problems and the best hope for their cure. All the classical economists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, stressed the importance of technological changes. Thomas Malthus’s pessimism that runaway population growth would lead to increasing misery as the world’s population expanded more rapidly than the food supply proved wrong because technological changes stayed ahead of population growth.

Prosperity is closely linked to technological advances. Technology is critical to the world’s continued economic growth. It provides the knowledge to convert the factors of production into goods and services. It also gives rise ...