On the bridges between two disciplines: Technology management-industrial engineering

With the beginning of industrial engineering (IE), roles of the industrial engineers have been continuously expanding depending upon the requirements of the modern world. Up till now, many different fields have been the major studying areas of IE discipline, such as production planning, quality control, optimization and etc. Obviously, it has been impossible to manage and monitor these fields without taking the technology into account. In this respect, as an outstanding research area and business field, technology management (TM) knowledge and skills have been requested in the favor of industrial engineers. Thereby, this study outlines possible roles and expectations on industrial engineers in TM field. With this purpose, content similarities of related educational curriculums, common tools and techniques used by the both disciplines are analyzed. In addition to that, some sample cases from job announcements for IE qualifications are presented to indicate the relations between IE and TM. Finally, this study focuses on academic similarities of both fields by examining the academic publications with IE affiliation in the field of TM.