Pantano, Victor
Description
Central to this thesis is the issue of how to account for the effects of micro-level
organisational factors such as culture and social norms on the technology transfer process.
The expansion of multinational firms has created a need for increased international
technology transfer into nations with distinctly different cultures, social norms and
· methods of organisation. The dilemma of how to deal with the transfer of technology into
different countries is a continuing problem for...[Show more] academics in the innovation adoption field
and corporate managers alike.
A synthesis of the literature revealed a lack of understanding associated with the
influence of managerial interventions, social, cultural and other organisational processes
on the adoption decision. In an international context, it was found that there was an
increased need to understand cross-national differences in the determinants of technology
adoption. Further, the bulk of conceptual technology transfer models were found to be
difficuit to operationalise and overwhelmingly unidimensional. This precipitated a need
to develop a pragmatic interactive and dynamic interdisciplinary model that could be used
to quantitatively predict transfer difficulty and develop implementation strategy.
Longitudinal research methods were used to investigate the implementation of a
knowledge management system within a multinational automotive manufacturing
organisation. Focusing on two distinct cultures - Australia and India, observations
showed that innovation perceptions have a comparatively minor influence on the adoption
decision and advocated a need for frameworks capable of explaining adoption and
diffusion from a cultural and social basis. These findings were subsequently reinforced
through an investigative case study of technology transfer within the automotive
manufacturing organisation at a global (or corporate) level. Both research studies
supported the conceptualisation of the transfer process as a game between two players
(management and the workforce) each weighing perceived advantages and disadvantages
associated with adoption relative to their internal schemata. The extent and seriousness of
the game is in the first instance determined by the technology itself and later moderated
by the cultural, organisational and social norms that dictate play. This game-play notion was the platform upon which specifications for the international
technology transfer model were developed. An integration of the literature review and
research case studies, produced a top-level requirements model based on various inputs,
desired outputs and operating conditions. A variety of interdisciplinary concepts
including: technology classification, social capital, the social discount rate, investment
appraisal (utilising cost-benefit analysis) and game theory, were used to construct a threestage
model of technology transfer. An innovative hypothesis is put forward, enabling
the derivation of the social discount rate (based on the social time preference rate) from
estimates of a culture's social capital (principally based on measures of trust).
Verification and validation of the model showed significant explanatory power in a
retrospective context. It also highlighted the model's ability to differentiate between
cultures and its potential ability as a predictive tool. It is thought that the greatest
application for the model lies in its potential use as a pre-transfer assessment tool aiding
corporate managers in the formulation of implementation strategy.
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