Technology is often seen as the engine of economic growth. Michael Porter confirms this in his statement: “an upgrading economy demands a steadily rising level of technology. Technological change, in the broadest sense of the term, accounts for much of economic growth”.

The management of technology is therefore an important function within any organisation, whether it be as a core resource of technology-based companies or as a support resource in service organisations. Technology, in different formats and in many different applications, is present over the whole lifecycle of projects and its activities. Gregory (1995) identified the typical technology management activities as Identification, Selection, Acquisition, Exploitation and Protection.

Many different methods and tools/frameworks were developed to assist organisations in the execution of their technology management activities and the search for new ones continues as the business environment keeps changing because of new emerging and disruptive technologies.

Therefore, the main research question of the theme is: How can technology shape the competitiveness of organisations?

Researchers thus ask questions such as:

• How can we assess current and emerging technologies?
• How can we forecast future technology landscapes?
• How can we select new technologies that will add value to the organisation?
• What processes do we need to acquire and transfer new technologies (including R&D)?
• How should we exploit and protect our technologies for optimal utilisation?
• And what methods and tools can we use to perform the various technology management functions?

Because of the nature of technology management, the interface with the field of knowledge management through technology and knowledge intelligence is obvious.

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