Technology Management Welcomes Prof Mary Tripsas

Your first job was with IBM, correct? 

Yes. I worked in software development at IBM on an internal shop floor control system at a manufacturing facility. Even though we were the software engineers writing the code, we could also go to the plant floor and interact with the users of the system to better understand what they wanted. Oftentimes as a software engineer, all you do is just write the code; you don't actually get to see who's using it or what they're doing with it. And so, there was a lot of interactive prototyping. And that was also a very interesting time for me in terms of understanding the challenges of what's easy, technically, versus what people want to use.

You also had a stint on the business side of IBM and then attended business school?

Yes, I started as a software engineer at IBM, but in order to progress anywhere, you really had to spend time on the sales force. So, I moved out to California to a sales office. IBM had just announced its first PC, and the democratization of technology within organizations was starting to happen, so it was an interesting time. Ultimately, I missed the intellectual stimulation that came with software engineering. At that point in time, an MBA seemed like a good path that could open up more doors for me. So, I went and got my MBA at Harvard. It was there that I started to consider something more academic.

The MBA program was transformational for me. I thought I understood business from my CPA, but what a Harvard MBA does through case method discussions over two years is to really elevate you in terms of thinking broadly about problem-solving and integration within a broader business setting. When I graduated from HBS, I considered the doctoral program within the Harvard Business School but I wanted to get some more real-world experience. 

I understand that you worked with Michael Porter?

I spent time at what you could argue was a very academically oriented consulting firm, the Monitor Group. 

Michael Porter, who was a professor at Harvard Business School at the time, was one of the founders. I worked on a number of super interesting projects there. I also had the opportunity to help grow a new office in Milan, Italy. On one of my trips between Milan and Cambridge, where Monitor's headquarters were, I ended up meeting with one of the faculty members in the Management of Technological Innovation Group at the MIT Sloan School. I had always been interested in the management of technology from when I was very young, and there weren't very many doctoral programs that allowed you to focus on that specific phenomenon. MIT was on the leading edge of research in this area. So, I left Monitor, and I started this program.

Tell me about your early research.

So, as I said, I had seen this phenomenon related to how difficult it is for people and organizations to deal with radical changes in technology. I was super interested in what we now call ecosystems or the interdependencies of different firms that come together to create new systems of products. I was especially interested in what Adobe Systems was doing. Adobe democratized publishing; they created the very first desktop publishing system that had any commercial success. The founders, who had left Xerox PARC, did something that was incredibly innovative at the time. They enlisted other firms to develop certain pieces of their solution. As part of this system, they wanted to have real typographic-level fonts that could be used. So they licensed a bunch of fonts from a company called Mergenthaler Linotype. As I was discussing this with my advisor at the time, we realized that Mergenthaler Linotype had been licensing fonts that had been around since the 1800s. Based on that conversation, I ended up switching gears and writing my thesis about the typesetter industry. That landed me on a theme that I think has continued through much of my work. When you're looking at making a technical transition, developing the new technical capability can often be the least challenging part of making these transitions.

In the typesetter industry, it turned out that what protected these typesetter firms over generations of technology were the fonts. They had these large font libraries, and it was difficult for other firms to come in and replicate the 1000s and 1000s of font designs. This provided a buffer for these firms to go ahead and develop the new technology.

Since then, the work I've done - which is probably the most highly cited of my work - looks at the transition of photography firms from analog photography to digital imaging. And in that transition, the same thing was very much true. It wasn't the technology itself that was the problem. If you look at firms like Polaroid and Kodak, they have some of the most highly cited patents in digital imaging. They developed digital imaging technologies early, and they did it really well. So if that's true, then why did they fail so miserably? One of the answers has to do with the mental models of the management and the inability, despite having the technical capability, to shift their thinking about what the appropriate business models would be to commercialize that technology. At Polaroid, for instance, management was very much stuck on this belief that the "razor blade" model was the only way to make money. And so they had digital cameras that they could have released very early in the development of the market that the technical people had developed. But management wouldn't commercialize the digital camera until it could produce an instant Polaroid print. Because they thought they needed the print to be able to make money. And that certainly had been true for years for Polaroid. But with digital photography, people don't want to print; they can look at their pictures on a screen. And so, overcoming the sort of mental or cognitive biases, I think, in the end, is one of the more difficult things to accomplish. 

How does your research relate to your teaching?

During my doctoral training, I looked exclusively at large established firms and how they deal with managing technical transitions. And then, I got my first job at Wharton, where I was asked to teach entrepreneurship. I didn't know much about entrepreneurship, but I had an MBA and an understanding of business,