Technology Strategy in a Software Products Company

The primary contribution of the article is to provide a method to help understand the relationship between nurturing core technologies and the evolution of a product family. This method embraces product family mapping and allocation of R&D investments to elements within the evolving product family. The product platform concept, common for physical assembled products, is found to be meaningful for software products and a important aspect of managing development. The methods are applied to a software company. We show the consequences of different types of investment in core technologies on renewal of its software product platforms, and ultimately, on its commercial performance. The firm's choice of technology strategy was found to be associated with its commercial success. When the company focused on one core technology at the expense of another, its products faired poorly. When it pursued a more complete and integrative technology strategy, the opposite effect was observed. The study also shows the need for continuous renewal of underlying product platforms to realize sustained success. iMSSACHUStrrs iNSTrruT