Towards Building Multidisciplinary Knowledge on Management of Technology: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Management of technology (MOT) concerns the processes by which innovations in technology are transformed to ultimately diffuse into the marketplace. As such, operations management contributes to the multidisciplinary realm of MOT through its study of a firm's resource capabilities. This special issue offers a broad and deep discussion on the interface between MOT and POM. The contributions of the MOT special issue are fourfold. First, we invited scholars from a variety of disciplines to write papers that highlight a broad perspective of emerging problems in MOT that can be addressed by POM researchers. Second, a set of contributed papers is included in the special issue spanning several themes at the intersection of POM and MOT. Third, much of this article is devoted to a deep discussion of an emerging theme that represents a fundamental challenge to the modern, knowledge‐intensive firm. Specifically, we explore how firms develop and leverage internal and external knowledge‐based resource capabilities to respond to the dynamic opportunities and threats created by innovations in technology. Lastly, we provide a comprehensive discussion of future research opportunities that relate to the challenges in managing the knowledge‐intensive firm.