This primer enables professionals with technical expertise to collaborate with their business-side colleagues. Emphasizing brevity and clarity, it gives technical staff answers to their most pressing questions about economics, finance, marketing, strategic decision-making, accounting, management, and related subjects. It does not offer condensed 1st year MBA courses; instead, it presents streamlined concepts and insights that are easy enough to be accessible and challenging enough to hold one's interest. Its examples from pharma, IT, aircraft/navigation, and other industries highlight problems that technical professionals face daily. Written by "one of them," its credibility makes it more useful than Internet resources. Because it concentrates on pragmatic (as opposed to academic) approaches to business, it empowers technical staff to stay with the conversation--and take it to a higher level. Bertrand C. Liang, MD, PhD, MBA, is Managing Director of LCC Ventures and Executive Director of Pfenex, Inc. He is trained in molecular biology and genetics (PhD) and is a clinician (MD) with subspecialty training in neurology and oncology, and serves as a Visiting University Professor at Liaoning He University, Shenyang, China. Creates frameworks and builds concepts enabling technical staff to work with their business colleagues Delivers content for pragmatic, immediate use, not condensed presentations of subjects from first year MBA curriculum Extends readers' grasp by posting additional resources at a freely-available website

This primer enables professionals with technical expertise to collaborate with their business-side colleagues. Emphasizing brevity and clarity, it gives technical staff answers to their most pressing questions about economics, finance, marketing, strategic decision-making, accounting, management, and related subjects. It does not offer condensed 1st year MBA courses; instead, it presents streamlined concepts and insights that are easy enough to be accessible and challenging enough to hold one's interest. Its examples from pharma, IT, aircraft/navigation, and other industries highlight problems that technical professionals face daily. Written by "one of them," its credibility makes it more useful than Internet resources. Because it concentrates on pragmatic (as opposed to academic) approaches to business, it empowers technical staff to stay with the conversation--and take it to a higher level. Bertrand C. Liang, MD, PhD, MBA, is Managing Director of LCC Ventures and Executive Director of Pfenex, Inc. He is trained in molecular biology and genetics (PhD) and is a clinician (MD) with subspecialty training in neurology and oncology, and serves as a Visiting University Professor at Liaoning He University, Shenyang, China. Creates frameworks and builds concepts enabling technical staff to work with their business colleaguesDelivers content for pragmatic, immediate use, not condensed presentations of subjects from first year MBA curriculumExtends readers' grasp by posting additional resources at a freely-available website.

Can technical paradigms help managers lead technical companies? In Managing and Leading for Science Professionals, Bertrand Liang explains that they can, as he explores real issues of importance for technical students and managers who want to move into leadership positions. A CEO with an MBA, Liang originally trained as a neurology and oncology clinician and later earned a PhD in molecular biology and genetics. In this book, he emphasizes what he wishes he had known as he advanced through the organization. His practitioner's point of view is perfectly suited to those who are moving, or want to move, from the technical side to the business side. Focusing on the experiences of scientists and engineers, he teaches ways to speak top management's language. His insights deliver essential knowledge, empowering technical staff to succeed using the skills they know best. - Describes "what I wish I'd known" as a manager with a technical background - Focuses on using skills other than risk analysis to make decisions - Explores ways to lead and manage innovation, particularly in relation to executives' responsibilities, skills, and tolerance for risk

Fascinating and compelling in equal measure this volume presents a critical examination of the multilayered relationships between engineering and business. In so doing the study also stimulates ethical reflection on how these relationships either enhance or inhibit strategies to address vital issues of our time. In the context of geopolitical, economic, and environmental tendencies the authors explore the world that we should want to create and the role of the engineer and the business manager in this endeavor. Throughout this volume the authors identify periods of alignment and periods of tension between engineering and business. They look at focal points of the engineering-business nexus related to the development of capitalism. The book explores past and present movements to reshape, reform, or reject this nexus. The volume is informed by questions of importance for industry as well as for higher education. These are: What kinds of conflict arise for engineers in their attempts to straddle both professional and organizational commitments? How should professionals be managed to avoid a clash of managerial and professional cultures? How do engineers create value in firms and corporations? What kinds of tension exist between higher education and industry? What challenges does the neoliberal entrepreneurial university pose for management, faculty, students, society, and industry? Should engineering graduates be ready for work, and can they possibly be? What kinds of business issues are reflected in engineering education curricula, and for what purpose? Is there a limit to the degree of business hybridization in engineering degree programs, and if so, what would be the criterion for its definition? Is there a place in engineering education curricula for reflective critique of assumptions related to business and economic thinking? One ideal of management and control comes to the fore as the Anthropocene - the world transformed into an engineered artefact which includes human existence. The volume raises the question as to how engineering and business together should be considered, given the fact that the current engineering-business nexus remains embedded within an economic model of continual growth. By addressing macro-level issues such as energy policy, sustainable development, globalization, and social justice this study will both help create awareness and stimulate development of self-knowledge among practitioners, educators, and students thereby ultimately addressing the need for better informed citizens to safeguard planet Earth as a human life supporting system.

Innovation involves a set of processes which support the production and transformation of knowledge into new processes, technologies and products, goods and services, and provide an organization with particular strengths and value relative to other firms. In such a view, innovation is a key source of customer benefits and sustainable competitive advantage. Technological, Managerial and Organizational Core Competencies: Dynamic Innovation and Sustainable Development investigates the impact of knowledge management, information systems, finance, organizational networks, internationalization, strategic management, marketing, entrepreneurship, and sustainability on an organization that pursues dynamic innovation and sustainable advantage. This book provides research and practice for graduate and undergraduate programs, as well as business firms with different technological, managerial, and organizational perspectives. Further Description from the Editors: This book represents the culmination of an international project to compile inter-disciplinary research that most contributes to innovation. More specifically, this book is about innovation in firms, industries, nations and society. It speaks to professionals and researchers who want to improve their understanding of dynamic innovation and sustainable development. The Editors’ goal is to foster cross-pollination among researchers. To this aim, the Editors have selected and assembled 35 chapters that illustrate multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives and empiric results on innovation and the roles of Sustainability, Organizational Networks, Entrepreneurship, Knowledge Management, R&D&T (Research, Development and Technology) Management, Marketing, Finance, Internationalization, and Information Systems in the organization that pursues dynamic innovation and sustainable development. Innovation involves processes, organizational elements (or resources), and Organizational Abilities (OA) that support the production and transformation of knowledge into new knowledge, processes, structures, technologies and products, goods and services. At the firm and industry levels of analysis, innovation can provide organizations with strengths relative to other firms, clusters, and nations and it is a key source of customer benefits and sustainable development. At the collective and societal levels of analysis, innovation can provide humanity with economic, social and environmental wealth through sustainable development. The uniqueness of this book lies in the participants’ efforts to identify Organizations' Creative Areas (OCA) that can provide core competencies for the organization in pursuit of dynamic innovation and sustainable development. In this perspective, innovation is a dynamic system and it is contingent upon a set of core competencies that couple to each other. Therefore, changing of even one competence can affect the organization's ability to innovate. The book avoids the term competitive advantage and adopts a more fruitful perspective of sustainable development – “the process of achieving human development … in an inclusive, connected, equitable, prudent, and secure manner”. An inclusive perspective sees traditional competitive advantage as occupying one extreme, whereas truly sustainable development occupies the opposite extreme. Sustainable development must benefit not only the organization and its customers, but also the whole society and the future of humanity through sustainability. Most chapters of this book fall between these extremes.

The power of modern information systems and information technology (lSIIT) offers new opportunities to rethink, at the broadest levels, existing business strategies, approaches and practices. Over the past decade, IT has opened up new business opportunities, led to the development of new strategic IS and challenged all managers and users of ISIIT to devise new ways to make better use of information. Yet this era which began with much confidence and optimism is now suffering under a legacy of systems that are increasingly failing to meet business needs, and lasting fixes are proving costly and difficult to implement. General management is experiencing a crisis of confidence in their IS functions and in the chiefinformation systems officers who lead them (Earl and Feeney, 1994:11). The concern for chief executive officers is that they are confronting a situation that is seemingly out of control. They are asking, 'What is the best way to rein in these problems and effectively assess IS performance? Further, how can we be certain that IS is adequately adding value to the organisational bottom line?' On the other hand, IS executives and professionals who are responsible for creating, managing and maintaining the organisation's systems are worried about the preparedness of general managers to cope with the growth in new technologies and systems. They see IT having a polarising effect on general managers; it either bedazzles or frightens them (Davenport, 1994: 119).