Bernhard Lingens

Towards an Attention‐Based View of Technology Decisions

The importance of technology decisions is widely acknowledged in both research and practice. However, we know little about how companies structure technology decisions from an organizational point of view and how attention is distributed in the course of the decision process in order to identify, process, and transfer information between the organizational units involved. Using the attention‐based view of the firm and 14 qualitative case studies, we present five approaches for organizing technology decisions: (1) centralized decision‐making, (2) busy information bee, (3) double‐blind analysis, (4) moderated expert panel, and (5) coterie approach. On this ground, this paper introduces a new, attention‐based view on technology decisions, which improves the theoretical understanding of organizations and provides guidelines for practitioners in choosing an appropriate organizational configuration in this regard.

Archetypes and Basic Strategies of Technology Decisions

OVERVIEW: Technology decisions are of central importance to firms focused on innovation. Research has provided support for a wide variety of approaches to technology decision making. This proliferation of approaches, however, means managers face the challenge of choosing the right approach for a given decision. Through case studies and workshops with a wide range of firms, we have developed a tool to assist managers in selecting appropriate approaches for the specific technology decision at hand.