ARENA: Structured Visual Mapping of the Technological Ecology

Summary form only given. A study of five hundred senior executive presentations to the analyst community reveals multiple references to the business arena: technologies, competitors, distribution chain, supply chain, regulators, media, markets etc. The study exposes the fact that senior executives in large US and international firms strive to map their business environment. Many of these efforts take a visual form. The study shows that these visual representations are inconsistent in terms of symbols, syntax, flow etc. Academic approaches to visual arena mapping are just as unstructured. We appropriate the Unified-Modeling-Language - a discipline developed for systems analysis and design by computer scientists to map the business arena. Next, we present the ARENA formalism. Finally, we illustrate how the ARENA formalism facilitates a synthesis of concepts and models from the technology management realm.