Executive Education

Description
It's not enough to have a great idea. If your R&D dollars are going to pay off in profitable products and technologies, you need a strategy that not only makes markets but also beats the competition.

Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy presents a depth of challenges that extend from R&D to manufacturing, engineering, project management, and new ventures. Where do you begin? How do you decide which projects are most likely to succeed and in which technologies to invest? How can you link your technology choices with your business choices?

Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy provides an innovative and powerful approach to developing technologies and products that people want to buy. Equally important, it explores ways to link those technologies and products with your company's business strategy. Drawn from the MIT Sloan School's top-ranked MBA curriculum, this groundbreaking program provides a framework for understanding how technologies and markets evolve, how they are linked, how technologies differ across markets, and how new technologies get accepted.

Participants will develop the skill to identify profitable projects for their research dollars and find out how to capture the value of those projects. They will learn how to build technical capabilities for products that create value for their customers and how to restructure their organizations to respond to market and technical dynamics. Most important, they will leave the program with the know-how to implement their strategies for maximum benefit.

The Participants
Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy is a must for senior general and technical executives involved in developing, managing, or marketing technology or products, or with managing organizations that sell their products in rapidly changing markets. The program is designed for managers in technology-intensive organizations, marketing and business development executives in technology organizations, and R&D managers in any organization.

Faculty
Fiona Murray, Senior Sarofim Family Career Development Professor and Associate Professor, Management of Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship, studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship including the campus-wide iTeams course developing "go-to-market" strategies for breakthrough innovations developed in MIT labs.

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan, Associate Professor of Strategic Management and course head of the Core Strategy Department at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an economic sociologist with a focus on social network analysis. He studies how social structures of various kinds emerge and influence behavior and key outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. Zuckerman’s current research projects include a study of industry peer networks, exclusive groups of non-competing peer firms from the same industry that gather on a regular basis to learn from one another’s experiences and to motivate one another to achieve higher performance.