Frederick Betz - Böcker

Written by the author who helped crystalize the field of technology management and the management of innovation with the first two editions of Managing Technological Innovation, this Third Edition brings the subject in line with current business strategy. It also presents information in a newer organized format that aligns more closely with how the topics are presented and discussed in the classroom. Also included is a wider discussion of how science and technology interact with the global economy.

What is science? How is it performed? Is science only a method or is it also an institution? These are questions at the core of Managing Science, a handbook on how scientific research is conducted and its results disseminated.Knowledge creation occurs through scientific research in universities, industrial laboratories, and government agencies. Any knowledge management system needs to promote effective research processes to foster innovation, and, ultimately, to channel that innovation into economic competitiveness and wealth. However, science is a complicated topic. It includes both methodological aspects and organizational aspects, which have traditionally been discussed in isolation from each other. In Managing Science, Frederick Betz presents a holistic approach to science, incorporating both philosophical and practical elements, in a framework that integrates scientific method, content, administration and application. Illustrating all of the key concepts with illustrative case studies (both historical and contemporary, and from a wide spectrum of fields), Betz provides in-depth discussion of the process of science. He addresses the social, organizational, institutional, and infrastructural context through which research projects are designed and their results applied, along the path from experimentation to innovation to commercialization of new products, services, and processes. This practical approach to science is the foundation of today's knowledge-intensive and technology-enabled industries, and positions the management of science within the broader context of knowledge management and its implications for organizations, industries, and regional and national technology management policies. Managing Science will be an essential resource for students in all areas of research, industry scientists and R&D specialists, policymakers and university administrators, and anyone concerned with the application of research to economic growth and development.

At both a micro-information level and a macro-societal level, the concepts of “knowledge” and “wisdom” are complementary – in both decisions and in social structures and institutions.  At the decision level, knowledge is concerned with how to make a proper choice of means, where “best” is measured as the efficiency toward achieving an end.  Wisdom is concerned with how to make a proper choice of ends  that attain “best” values.At a societal level, knowledge is managed through science/technology and innovation.  And while science/technology is society's way to create new means with high efficiencies, they reveal nothing about values.  Technology can be used for good or for evil, to make the world into a garden or to destroy all life.  It is societal wisdom which should influence the choice of proper ends -- ends to make the world a garden.How can society make progress in wisdom as well as knowledge?  Historically, the disciplines of the physical sciences and biology have provided scientific foundations for societal knowledge  But the social science disciplines of sociology, economics, political science have not provided a similar scientific foundation for societal wisdom.  To redress this gap, Frederick Betz examines several cases in recent history that display a fundamental paradox between scientific/technological achievement with devastating social effects (i.e., historical events of ideological dictatorships in Russia, Germany, China, and Yugoslavia). He builds a new framework for applying social science perspectives to explain societal histories and social theory.  Emerging from this methodological and empirical investigation is a general topological theory of societal dynamics.  This theory andmethodology can be used to integrate history and social science toward establishing grounded principles of societal wisdom.

What is science? How is it performed? Is science only a method or is it also an institution? These are questions at the core of Managing Science, a handbook on how scientific research is conducted and its results disseminated.Knowledge creation occurs through scientific research in universities, industrial laboratories, and government agencies. Any knowledge management system needs to promote effective research processes to foster innovation, and, ultimately, to channel that innovation into economic competitiveness and wealth. However, science is a complicated topic. It includes both methodological aspects and organizational aspects, which have traditionally been discussed in isolation from each other. In Managing Science, Frederick Betz presents a holistic approach to science, incorporating both philosophical and practical elements, in a framework that integrates scientific method, content, administration and application. Illustrating all of the key concepts with illustrative case studies (both historical and contemporary, and from a wide spectrum of fields), Betz provides in-depth discussion of the process of science. He addresses the social, organizational, institutional, and infrastructural context through which research projects are designed and their results applied, along the path from experimentation to innovation to commercialization of new products, services, and processes. This practical approach to science is the foundation of today's knowledge-intensive and technology-enabled industries, and positions the management of science within the broader context of knowledge management and its implications for organizations, industries, and regional and national technology management policies. Managing Science will be an essential resource for students in all areas of research, industry scientists and R&D specialists, policymakers and university administrators, and anyone concerned with the application of research to economic growth and development.

At both a micro-information level and a macro-societal level, the concepts of “knowledge” and “wisdom” are complementary – in both decisions and in social structures and institutions.  At the decision level, knowledge is concerned with how to make a proper choice of means, where “best” is measured as the efficiency toward achieving an end.  Wisdom is concerned with how to make a proper choice of ends  that attain “best” values.At a societal level, knowledge is managed through science/technology and innovation.  And while science/technology is society's way to create new means with high efficiencies, they reveal nothing about values.  Technology can be used for good or for evil, to make the world into a garden or to destroy all life.  It is societal wisdom which should influence the choice of proper ends -- ends to make the world a garden.How can society make progress in wisdom as well as knowledge?  Historically, the disciplines of the physical sciences and biology have provided scientific foundations for societal knowledge  But the social science disciplines of sociology, economics, political science have not provided a similar scientific foundation for societal wisdom.  To redress this gap, Frederick Betz examines several cases in recent history that display a fundamental paradox between scientific/technological achievement with devastating social effects (i.e., historical events of ideological dictatorships in Russia, Germany, China, and Yugoslavia). He builds a new framework for applying social science perspectives to explain societal histories and social theory.  Emerging from this methodological and empirical investigation is a general topological theory of societal dynamics.  This theory andmethodology can be used to integrate history and social science toward establishing grounded principles of societal wisdom.

Leadership and strategy are intricately connected--one of the primary responsibilities of leaders is to formulate strategy. In an organization, only the leader has the power to implement strategic change. Thus strategic thinking is a necessary and fundamental cognitive ability of a leader. Strategic thinking requires both an idealism (to imagine a better world) and a realism (to acquire the resources, skills and organization to get there). However, most organizations focus on short-term thinking for their employees and leave long-term strategy to the executives. But no high-level executive in any organization is fully knowledgeable about the details of operations. Thus for realistic strategy, there is a need for good top-down and bottom-up communication. When organizational communication is only top-down, high-level strategy can become only wishful thinking by the CEO. The purpose of proper strategic thinking is to eliminate wishful-thinking from organizational strategy. Strategic thinking is necessary at every level of an organization, not just at the top. This book uses actual histories of business successes and failures to illustrate theoretical concepts in strategic thinking.

Strategy needs to be partly idealistic and partly realistic. On the one hand, it exists to help managers and executives envision the most beneficial future possible-one that is optimally competitive and profitable. But such visualizing needs to go hand-in-hand with concrete planning. In order to formulate a strategy that will really work, organizations need to master the technique of modelling in order to plan what can properly be called strategic business model, a model that both depicts the operations of a business and that provides the analytical basis for examining and formulating the plan for the future operations of a firm.Here leading expert Frederick Betz reviews the strategic modelling technique and applies it to diverse kinds of businesses, both productive and financial, and including banks and hedge funds. He illustrates the possibilities of this technique-and the pitfalls of using it incorrectly-by applying it to real business cases, some successful and some problematic. As strategic business models are important to understand the transformative operations of an enterprise system for present and future competitiveness, Betz's exploration into both manufacturing and financial firms, along with retailing firms and conglomerates, broadens the business literature.Strategic Business Models: Idealism and Realism in Strategy is essential reading for managers and strategists wishing to optimize the effectiveness of their strategic planning.

Bank panics have always mattered because they create serious disruptions in economic and financial activity, depressing national economies.  But they matter even more now, as information and communications technologies have stitched together a global financial system that is more vulnerable to crisis on a large scale. For example, the global bank panic of 2007-08 froze up the national economies of the U.S., England, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Germany -- all at the same time.  And each of their governments had to act to bail out their own banks, without a consistent international regulatory framework.In this volume, Fred Betz takes a unique, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding bank panics, with an emphasis on the U.S. Bank Panics of 1857, 1907, 1930-33, 2007-08 and the European Bank Panics of 2010-2013.  Despite over a hundred years of modern economic theory and many excellent historical studies about bank panics, they are still poorly understood and certainly not yet preventable.  Partly this has been a function of the limitations of modern economic theory, which cannot interpret bank panics as complex societal phenomena.   All societal phenomena are, in reality, multi-disciplinary in scope and cross-disciplinary in connections.  Bank panics can best be understood through the collective lenses of sociology, political science, psychology, management science, management of technology, among other disciplines.  Through this dynamic approach, the author identifies five key underlying triggers of bank panics: (1) funding excessive leverage in speculation, (2) lack of proper banking regulation, (3) bad banking practices, (4) lack of banking integrity, (5) corrupt banking practices.  In so doing, he suggests new strategies for avoiding and recovering from bank panics and other financial crises.