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Technology assessment
Potentially disruptive technologies emerging from laboratories around the globe drive many organizations' future opportunities and risks. To be successfully adaptive, an organization must be able to speedily identify which technologies will be significant, to analyze their potential impacts, and to understand the uncertainties of their commercialization. Making the uncertainties about the future explicit is the key to understanding the possibilities and making good choices about where and when to invest.
A method for dealing with the challenge
What organizations need is a systematic way to look at the full range of emerging technologies, see the commercialization possibilities, understand their uncertainties, compare the technologies, select the ones to focus on, and continually review new information and choices. As a case in point, SRIC-BI recently applied its opportunity-discovery process to a challenging problem facing the US government: Identify the most important civilian technologies that could be disruptive to US interests up to 2025.[1]
Key features of the process include:
- Assembling a multidisciplinary group of technology and market analysts.
- Using a common language for describing and discussing emerging technologies.
- Using workshops to assimilate and sort through information rapidly, generate innovative ideas, conduct comparisons, and segregate results.
- Preparing decision-oriented profiles of high-potential technologies.
Exhibit 1 [Figure omitted. See Article Image.] shows a schematic of SRIC-BI's process applied by a group of its technology analysts in California and England in a project for the US government.
The process started with the effort to identify all the possibilities for disruptive technologies that could influence US interests in the next 20 years. A multidisciplinary project team of experienced technologists used wiki software (from JotSpot) to facilitate the online development of disruptive-technology ideas and capture notes on those ideas. Analysts filed technology notes on the wiki covering:
- Basic description. What is the technology, how could it develop, and what would be new capabilities and benefits?
- Significance. What's different from today's equivalent technology, and why could development be significant?
- Disruption. In what aspects of the technology is it possible to anticipate consequences of the technology's development that might be disruptive? In which applications? And under what circumstances?
By using a wiki, SRIC-BI analysts were able to edit and comment collaboratively about each other's submissions,...