From Followers to Leaders

How to improve technology management in follower-firms wherever they are located.This textbook is the result of ten years of teaching international technology management to managers and engineers (at Stanford University) and managing technology in a successful medium-sized firm in India.The last years have seen a profusion of books and articles on managing technology, focused almost exclusively on leading edge firms in leading edge countries. If one's firm is not IBM or Intel or Hewlett Packard or Glaxo or Microsoft, and has no expectation of pushing forward the frontiers of industrial knowledge, there is surprisingly little experience to draw on. This book expects to fill the gap.This book argues that succeeding as a follower-firm requires learning from many experiences and avoiding simplistic 'how-to' approaches that prescribe one best practice. We argue that there are many 'leading edges' and that they appear in the most unlikely places. The book contains major case studies from many different firms in twelve countries in five continents, in industry segments as diverse as pharmaceuticals, software, garments, beer and steel. They show that successful experiences can arise anywhere in the world.Individual chapters cover the role of innovation on the shop-floor, the importance of mixing process and product innovation, the challenges involved in building an innovation culture, the special role of R&D, and of design, all from a follower perspective. These topics instruct a deeper understanding of strategy in follower-firms, simultaneously providing insight for public policy in building local technological capacity.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.