Venturing into new technological markets

Venturing into competitive technological markets with a new high-technology product is a major policy decision having potential long-term effects on the organization faced by this decision. This paper describes the analysis of such a policy decision borne out of a real case in the electronics industry. The decision analyzed in this paper is concerned with the entry phase to a new technological market, where the decision itself is to identify the best market entry option available to management at the time of the analysis. Basically, these market entry options are comprised of contract agreements with, or acquisitions of, distributors of varied sizes and nature of operations. Each one of these market entry options has its obvious weak and strong points. These points have first of all to be identified and later prioritized according to the structure provided by the model. The structuring as well as the measurement methodology used for this problem is provided by the Analytic Hierarchy Process. The resulting model is a hierarchy of issues whose prioritization provides the set of leading market entry options promising the best balance of qualities contributing to successful market entry.