So I started to follow a Masters study at the Delft University of Technology in fall 2008. It is a 2-year course of Management of Technology. I see this study as a facilitator for me to bridge between my technical knowledge in the software engineering realm and the managerial aspects of technology. I decided I need to do this because of my personal experiences looking at the clash between technical and business people. I figured I'd have the best of both worlds.
As the study nearing its end, I am to write a Master's thesis based on a research study. I opted to perform the research at a company of my own search. The search led me to a couple of interesting companies with interesting projects. At the end I had chosen to go on with ABN AMRO. The department I am interning at is ABN's Incubator, the Dialogues House. It is a business incubator that captures ideas within ABN AMRO and assesses them for their feasibility to be turned into new ventures.
My role here is to investigate the decision criteria for the decision makers, when they make the decision of whether a new idea should go on to the next stage or not. In parallel, I am also developing a decision support tool for the decision makers. This tool will give an overview of the on going projects and their position in the portfolio funnel (a funnel adopted based on the New Product Development Stage-Gate model of Robert G. Cooper). The decision support tool will also give project's information such as the resources it needs vs the overall resources available for all projects. Most importantly, this tool will require innovation managers to post answers to the criteria (my research focus) they are confronted when inputing a new project, which will be a decision support for the decision makers when making their go/kill decisions.
This project is really interesting from an academic point of view as I have to try to generalize all kinds of different ideas, which might or might not be strategically fit with ABN AMRO's strategy as a financial services institution, and formulate a generic decision criteria for these ideas. There have been some research in the past on this area, but my research will be specific to a business incubator environment, more specifically ones that are like the Dialogues House ;P. Whats more interesting for the business is the Decision Support tool that I'm developing. If this is a success, we might be looking into scaling the application to fit all business incubators ;) (ambitious)
This might all seem a bit blurry but I intend to label this topic on this blog to document the progress of this project. I hope a lot of people can benefit from this. Especially those who are dealing with portfolio selection complications or similar issues ;)
I'll keep you posted!
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