Contemporary strategy, management approaches, and best-practices for research and development. This course focuses on private sector methods to manage technology programs, identify and specify technical requirements, communicate technology use and value, and assess new technologies and architectures. It includes instruction on technology scouting and assessing Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs). Through engagement with experts in creating and managing technology, participants are also exposed to human and behavioral factors that can influence technology adoption in the commercial and public sector.

Best practices and challenges in organizing and cultivating new ideas into successful public and private sector technology ventures. This course provides an integrated strategic framework for innovation-based entrepreneurs and technology professionals. It is structured to provide a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing startup innovators, a synthetic framework for the development and implementation of entrepreneurial strategy in dynamic environments, and the ability to scale those ventures over time.

Systems engineering approaches to the definition, design, development, implementation, integration, verification, and validation of successful systems. Taught by faculty from the Clark School of Engineering, this course exposes technology managers to the critical collaboration between business leaders and IT leaders in the early stages of program definition and how to effectively leverage and assess business-driven enterprise, product, and program development. It covers contemporary product lifecycle phases and the systems engineering technical processes associated with research and product development organizations in industry and government. It also explores currently popular development methodologies such as incremental, spiral, evolutionary, lean, and agile and how these are driven by concept and requirements development, systems analysis and modeling, and system architecting and are measured by technology prototyping, research validation, technology testing, and program/product evaluation.

Application of financial management principles and techniques to science and technology investments and research and development projects. This course enables technology managers to estimate return on investment of R&D projects, value technology assets, quantify risk and make sound replacement and upgrade decisions for S&T projects. By the end of the course, participants will be able to build financial models and make presentations to senior executives explaining the value creation potentially arising from investments in R&D and new product development, as well as infrastructure necessary to sustain the enterprise.

Challenges and best practices of successfully marketing emergent technologies. This course begins with a discussion of past successes and failures in marketing emergent technologies, followed by a study of the effective approaches and frameworks that help technology managers identify and understand customer needs. Participants also focus on analyzing how identified customer needs can guide design and development of emergent technologies, how to translate customer needs and market conditions into effectively positioning emergent technologies, and maximizing success in converting new technologies to market or mission-ready products.

A mastery session consisting of a series of intensive in-class lectures/discussions and a tabletop simulation focused on the cyber threat landscape, motives and effects of threat actors, methods and challenges to measuring cyber risk, and optimizing resource allocation in the defense of complex organizations. Taught by faculty from the School of Public Policy and Information Sciences, this course will explore the range of technical complexity, and their vulnerabilities, introduced in modern organizations including the integration of Internet of Things (IOT), Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT), cloud computing, and other distributed systems. It will also expose participants to the process of hacking; categorizing and defining the range of threat actors and motives including criminal organizations, nation states, and hacktivists; analytic models and methods to quantify primary/secondary effects of cyber-attacks on organizations; analytic methods to quantify societal effects of cyber-attacks on interdependent organizations; and consolidating and visualizing complexity in organizational risk and techniques for translating technical vulnerabilities in systems to the operations they support.

A mastery session consisting of a series of intensive in-class lectures/discussions on issues surrounding corporate structure and law relevant to technology business, development and innovation. This course will educate participants on the range of legal mechanisms by which enterprises can market and manage technology solutions, understanding decisions and outcomes associated with technology from merger and acquisition activities, and accounting for legal management and protection of intellectual property (IP).

As technology provides us with new opportunities, it also presents new ethical questions, such as privacy, or new dimensions to familiar ethical questions that must be addressed in order for society to recognize net gains from these advancements. This course focuses on raising participants’ awareness of the ethical dimensions of technological advancements. Structured as a mastery session consisting of a series of intensive in-class lectures, discussions and case studies, it addresses anticipating common ethical dilemmas faced by technology managers, anticipating the most common reasons and rationalizations one would encounter when proposing the organization do the right thing, and then exploring one’s own personal communication style, risk aversion and purpose in order to find an appropriate way to attempt to influence the organization to do the right thing.

Experiential practicum to apply the skills and learning outcomes accumulated throughout the Technology Management curriculum toward solving real-world problems and cases. Projects will be chosen and executed in teams, and when possible sponsored by student employers or school public and private sector partners. Project selection and maturation receive iterative faculty facilitation.