Management of Technology, Research, and Development

Domain 8 of our series on The Engineering Management Handbook, 3rd Edition (ASEM).

Great technology does not sell itself. This domain is about turning technical capability into commercial value—through innovation and entrepreneurship on one side, and marketing and sales on the other. For engineering managers who aspire to lead product organizations or launch ventures, it is among the most opportunity-rich sections of the Handbook.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Engineers

The first topic distinguishes and connects innovation (creating value from new ideas) and entrepreneurship (building ventures to deliver that value). Engineers are natural innovators—their training encourages problem-solving and creativity—but converting invention into a viable product or business requires additional skills the domain sets out to build.

Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneurial Competencies

A central concept is intrapreneurship: pursuing entrepreneurial initiatives within an existing organization. This matters because most engineers will innovate inside a company rather than found a startup, and intrapreneurship lets them champion new products and processes with the backing of established resources. The domain examines the entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial competencies engineers need—opportunity recognition, risk-taking, resourcefulness, persistence—and how those competencies relate to engineering management. The practical message is that these are learnable capabilities, not innate traits.

Innovation in Practice

The domain grounds its concepts in vivid, current examples that show innovation and entrepreneurship across products and services:

• Package-free cosmetics — sustainability-driven product innovation.
• Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) — innovation tackling a hard decarbonization problem in a heavily engineered industry.
• Zipline — the first national drone-delivery program at scale, illustrating service innovation and the operational challenge of deploying a novel technology in the real world.

These cases connect technology management to the sustainability themes running through the modern Handbook, and they show that innovation applies to services and business models, not just physical products.

Marketing and Sales in Engineering Organizations

The second topic addresses a subject engineers often overlook: marketing and sales. It defines marketing's goals and practices and, crucially, ties them to engineering management—because engineers who understand customers build better products, and engineering managers who understand marketing make better strategic decisions about what to build and how to position it.

From Market Intelligence to Global Marketing

The marketing topic is comprehensive, moving through:

• Market intelligence — gathering and interpreting information about customers and competitors.
• Marketing strategy — deciding which markets to serve and how to compete.
• Marketing operations — executing campaigns and managing the marketing function.
• Interactive / e-marketing — digital channels and their growing dominance.
• Global / international marketing — reaching customers across borders.
• Cross-cultural management differences — adapting to how business norms vary internationally.

For engineering managers, the value is not becoming marketers but becoming fluent enough to collaborate with them and to weigh market realities in technical decisions.

What This Means for Prospective Students

This domain speaks to two ambitions: leading product and R&D organizations, and founding or growing ventures. Many MEM programs offer electives in technology management, innovation, entrepreneurship, and product development, and some connect to product management career paths. If you want to be the person deciding what gets built and why—not only how—this is your domain. Next in the series: Systems Engineering and Systems Thinking.