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86 Technology and Engineering

knowing how much technology they need, how long it will take to acquire it, or how much it will cost. The founders of a new venture must understand the firm's technology well enough to measure it. The following subsections should help them achieve that level of understanding.

TECHNOLOGY PUSH AND MARKET PULL

Product development is usually characterized as involving either technology push or market pull. According to the technology-push model, products originate with a flow of ideas that starts in research, progress through advanced development and product development, and ultimately reach the customer. According to the market-pull model, products originate with customers, who specify their requirements to a marketing organization, which, in turn, tells a development organization what to design and build, with research and advanced technology playing only a minor role. Strictly speaking, neither of these two models is correct, even for limited classes of products. Companies that operate exclusively according to either of these models are doomed to fail, because product and market responsibility must be disseminated throughout the entire organization in order for top-quality products to be created.

During the past decade, every company has attempted to characterize itself as "market-driven." Unfortunately, that often translates to "marketing-department -driven." In such a firm, the marketing department talks to some users and comes to the engineering organization with a comprehensive list of requirements for the proposed product. The list is inevitably embellished with marketing's own ideas about how the product should be designed, since many high-tech marketing personnel are also former engineers. Products that are specified in this fashion have the following predictable attributes:

The desired delivery time is yesterday.1

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1 . Marketing wants it yesterday, engineering will have it tomorrow, and science is still working on it.

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