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Nearly every company uses technology in some form. And to maximize profit potential, it is imperative that companies integrate technology into strategic plans. The author presents a system for using technological resources better. This system has been successfully applied to a wide variety of companies including service organizations, companies selling products, businesses with high‐volume and low‐volume manufacturing processes, companies with rapidly advancing technology, and companies whose products use mature technology. Failing to integrate technology with strategic plans could mean a substantial decline in business.

Contemporary organizations are facing an operating environment characterized by volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and “permanent whitewater.” To sustain high performance in this context, organizations must be able to change and develop as efficiently and effectively as possible. Within organizations, there are actors who catalyze and advance change in this manner; these actors are known as “champions.” Yet the scholar who wishes to conduct research concerning champions of change and organizational development is likely to be met by a highly fragmented literature. Varying notions of champions are scattered throughout extant research, where authors of articles cite different sources when conceptualizing champions; often superficially. Furthermore, many types of highly specific and nuanced non-generalizable champions have proliferated, making it difficult for practitioners and researchers to discover useful findings on how to go about making meaningful changes in their context. The purpose of this study was to address these problems for practitioners and researchers by engendering thoroughness, clarity, and coherence within champion scholarship. This was done by conducting the first comprehensive, critical yet insightful review of the champion literature within the organizational sciences using content analysis to re-conceptualize champions and develop a meaningful typology from which the field can be advanced. The chapter first suggests a return to Schön (1963) as the basis from which to conceptualize champions and, second, offers a typology consisting of 10 meta-champions of organizational change and development – Collaboration, Human Rights, Innovation, Product, Project, Service, Strategic, Sustainability, Technology, and Venture Champions – from which change practice and future research can benefit.

This article reports three years' research into the pilot phase of the Social Science Research Council's Open Door Scheme, a scheme designed to facilitate social science research utilisation. Firstly, some general issues of social science utilisation are examined, followed by the background to the creation of the Council's Open Door Scheme to help meet these difficulties. Then, findings from research into the pilot phase of the scheme from 1977 to 1980 are discussed, including its future operation and potential for influencing managerial activity in its widest sense.