Development of Technology Strategies under Volatility and Uncertainty: A concept for the Continuous-Iterative Analysis of the Firm and its Environment

The dynamics and uncertainty of the environment in which companies operate has been increasing steadily over the past years. Subsumed under the acronym VUCA, more and more industries are confronted with transformative change in ever shorter time. The more dynamic and uncertain the environment becomes, the more important it becomes for companies to ensure a meaningful long-term development orientation of their capability base. Maintaining and expanding sustainable competitive advantage through building the technological capability basis is the mandate of a technology strategy. However, established methodologies for this are very time-consuming and only hardly situation-adaptive due to their discrete-sequential approach in combination with extensive analyses. Hence, a continuous iterative procedure for high turbulence environments is proposed. For such, the re-conception of the strategic analysis phase must be emphasized in order to achieve shorter development and reaction times while ensuring high decision quality. Therefore, the present paper aims to conceptualize such an analysis model. For this, the preliminary work for the overall methodology is briefly presented as the overarching framework of the analysis model. Subsequently, two analysis modes are differentiated, and the model structure is derived.