TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP

Technology Leadership

Technology Leadership

Digital leaders can be defined functionally by their contributions to the transition toward a knowledge society. These contributions include awareness building, resource mobilization, operational leadership, and structural leadership. Awareness-building leaders convince sections of the population to attend to the new ICTs as resources that can help them achieve their goals (Sheff, 2007). Indeed, mobilizing an effective pro-diffusion political coalition is an essential element of digital leadership and in leadership in the digital age more broadly (Dutta, 2006).

Pro-diffusion coalitions are societal groups that support legal, regulatory, legislative, organizational, and other changes necessary for the new technologies to diffuse, changes such as greater research and development budgets, ending monopolies in favor of greater competition, lower prices, private entrepreneurship, and so forth.

Digital leadership innovation is not static but rather changes through time. Because technology innovation is so highly dynamic, the mix of leadership skills required also changes. For example, the Internet industry has passed through pre-commercial, commercial, competitive, and consolidation phases. In the pre-commercial phase the Internet was created, managed, and used for noncommercial purposes, mostly by leading researchers and academics. The appearance of the first fully open, nondiscriminatory Internet Service Provider (ISP) marked the “commercial” phase (Romei, 2006). The third period began when several commercial ISPs were active, typically driving down prices and raising quality through competition. After this phase, consolidation occurred in the ISP market (during the period of 2000-2001).

Each phase had a slightly different mix of leaders interacting across the public, private, research, and civil society sectors. First driven by campus and think tank-based leaders in the research and development community, later in the commercial and competitive phases leadership initiative shifted to entrepreneurs (Hitt, 2008). In each phase, the technological, political, and resource challenges were rather different and demanded different mixes of leaders. In the ...