Technology Transfer: Measuring the Impact of Organisational and Managerial Structures on Production Efficiency

Inter-country transfer of technology offers the lure of the productivity advances so fundamentally necessary for continued economic growth. Increasingly, however, notable failures in such transfers have raised questions about the adaptability of technology to new environments. The introduction of unfamiliar processes, working conditions and management structures has involved the nagging repercussions of production problems and lingering societal upheaval that work against the realisation of the anticipated gains. Although there are ample examples of technology transfer, some resulting in resounding success and others in equally resounding failure, there remains a void in terms of the formulation of a workable analytic process for indentifying and measuring the ‘transferability’ (across the spectrum from likely failure to likely success) of particular technologies between specific countries or regions within a given country. Further, for industries such as high technology industries, easily measurable inputs do not take on the same importance as they do for primary, heavy resource-using industries. Instead such industries rely more heavily on unmeasurable factors including organisational structure and incentive formation. Indeed, changes in this direction have accompanied the natural progression of time. In the 1800s the availability of natural resources, particularly land, was the key to successful economic development, to successful technology transfer.