Abstract
Ensuring business benefits from IT investments in general is difficult enough; doing so for emerging technologies is even more challenging. At the same time new technologies are arriving at an increasing pace, which puts pressure on firms to continuously evaluate and assess the potential impact of emerging technologies. Similar companies investing in similar emerging technologies often end up with very different results – some gain technologically based competitive advantages, while others do nothing but spend resources on endless projects that result in minimal, if any, business impact.
Why are there such significant differences? One factor, among others, is how companies translate technological opportunities into new business benefits. This technology contextualization process is explored in this chapter. It is shown that re-contextualization of old technologies sometimes may be as important as contextualization of new technologies.