because the team didn’t establish a solid business case before they began development work. Conversely, if you're early in discovering an emerging technology, it can be difficult to discern whether there is a market for the technology or not, in which case you’ll need to begin some measure of development to get something into the market and see if there is any interest. So early development can inform the points of view and create a form of an iterative product market-fit loop for a while.

Development

Assuming the outcome of the point of view report confirms an addressable market for the emerging technology, then the next step would be to begin development. Development can pose unique challenges for an emerging technologies team, because in many cases the point of view report has helped identify a particular product or service within an organization that could benefit from adopting the emerging technology. The team behind this product or service is often referred to as the “catcher.”

In general, product engineering or IT development teams have an established roadmap and have allocated available resources to accomplish as much as possible. A common challenge for an emerging technologies team or function is working with the catchers to identify resources and in some cases, persuading them to create new resources to help incorporate the new technology into their existing roadmap. Naturally, catchers can be skeptical of a request for execution that can require additional time, budget or staffing and could compromise other action items that were already on their roadmap. Because of this, emerging technologies are at risk for deprioritization within many companies.

For many organizations, it makes sense to have an engineering team dedicated to emerging technologies work. This team of engineers should be able to begin executing and developing an emerging technology until a development team is able to hire and train engineers to maintain the technology once it’s no longer considered “emerging.” I’ve found that collaborating across product management, product engineering and development teams on the emerging technology’s design is a critical step. This fosters accountability and inclusion across all the teams that touch the emerging technology and avoids a “not invented here” response when the technology is transitioned from one team to another. Collaboration also ensures that all relevant parties are aware of the technology’s progress and goals stay aligned. They usually have the capacity to collaborate on the design, just not the development.

Commercialization

At some point, the development of the emerging technology will reach a phase where it could be considered an alpha or beta release and is on a trajectory towards a generally available (GA) release. At this point, the technology transfer process should begin between the emerging technology engineering managers and the catcher’s engineer managers to produce a technology transfer agreement. This technology transfer agreement is effectively a way to navigate the Innovator's Dilemma, a business challenge coined by Clayton Christenson that explains why disruptive leaders can fail as technologies and industries change and what organizations can do to secure their market success over time.

This agreement describes how the emerging technology will be commercialized and which organization—typically the identified catcher—will be responsible for lifecycle maintenance once it reaches GA. This agreement includes an engineering staffing plan between the two teams, in which the emerging technologies team temporarily loans the catcher’s team the engineers that helped develop the emerging technology to continue development until a GA release. This gives the catcher’s team time to hire additional staff and use the embedded emerging technologies team to train them and allow a skills transfer to take place. When the catching engineering team is ready and the duration that was agreed upon has expired, the emerging technology engineers transfer out of the catcher's team and back to their regular roles on the emerging technologies team to begin work on the next project.

Sewing emerging technologies into the fabric of an existing organization takes considerable dedication, strategic planning, and investment. By creating a dedicated emerging technologies function within your organization and cultivating collaboration with product and service teams, IT leaders can accelerate their innovation pipeline and harness the power of emerging technologies.