While novel technologies have tremendous competitive potential, they also involve certain risks. Maturity assessment analyzes how well a technological development can fulfill an expected task. The technology readiness level (TRL) has been considered to be one of the most promising approaches for addressing technological maturity. Nonetheless, its assessment requires opinions of the experts, which is costly and implies the risk of personal bias. To fill this gap, this paper presents a Bibliometric Method for Assessing Technological Maturity (BIMATEM). It is a repeatable framework that assesses maturity quantitatively. Our method is based on the assumption that each technology life cycle stage can be matched to technology records contained in scientific literature, patents, and news databases. The scientific papers and patent records of mature technologies display a logistic growth behavior, while news records follow a hype-type behavior. BIMATEM determines the maturity level by curve fitting technology records to these behaviors. To test our approach, BIMATEM was applied to additive manufacturing (AM) technologies. Our results revealed that material extrusion, material jetting, powder bed fusion and vat photopolymerization are the most mature AM technologies with TRL between 6 and 7, followed by directed energy deposition with TRL between 4 and 5, and binder jetting and sheet lamination, the least mature, with TRL between 1 and 2. BIMATEM can be used by competitive technology intelligence professionals, policymakers, and further decision makers whose main interests include assessing the risk of implementing new technologies. Future research can focus on testing the method with regard to altmetrics.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s11192-018-2941-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deliver a roadmap that displays pathways to develop sustainability skills in the engineering curricula. Design/methodology/approach The selected approach to enrich engineering students with sustainability skills was active learning methodologies. First, a survey was carried out on a sample of 189 students to test the current sustainability literacy and determine the roadmap starting point. Next, a scientometric study regarding active learning methodologies was executed. A total of 2,885 articles and conference proceedings from the period 2013-2016 were retrieved from the Web of Science database. The records were then imported into text mining software to undergo a term clumping process. Annual knowledge clusters based on key terms were outputted. Finally, a roadmap was created by experts based on the annual knowledge clusters. Findings Four annual pathways were created along the roadmap to develop sustainability skills during the four-year college course in engineering. The first consisted on promoting a recycling campaign through a circular economy. The second aimed at creating educational videos regarding sustainability. The third reinforced reasoning and argumentative skills by preparing a debate on environmental issues. The last path assumed that the student is working in internship programs and prepared him/her to apply environmental management models to solve sustainability issues within the company. Research limitations/implications Roadmaps should be updated approximately every two years to reflect novelty. The proposed methodology shows an easy way to create them. Practical implications Results from this paper, as well as the proposed methodology, can be applied to any organization forming individuals: from primary school education to employee training programs in organizations. Social implications The development of sustainability skills has a direct, positive impact on professional decision-making and, ultimately, on the environment. Originality/value This paper presents a roadmapping process to develop sustainability competences throughout engineering college education.

This work proposes an approach which combines a set of quantitative methods to generate technological roadmaps, which draw on Science, Technology & Innovation data. The approach is designed to be applied to emerging technologies and its outcomes can be considered as inputs for competitive technical intelligence activities. It comprises five integrated methods within the tech mining field, namely: scientometrics, for the retrieving and structuring of scientific publications and patents; text mining, in terms of term-clumping and subject-action-object analysis, for topical analysis; hierarchical clustering, to identify the structure of the technology; time series analysis, to get a quantitative measure of the evolution and forecast of the technology; and technological roadmapping, to integrate all the information in a single picture. The approach was applied to the combined field of additive manufacturing in aeronautics. The data was retrieved from Patseer, Web of Science and Scopus databases and the application of the overall approach allowed us to understand both what ideas have dominated the evolution of technology, and which can do so in the near future. Findings were placed in a technological roadmap. In the initial years, it shows embryonic developments of the technology, such as prototypes manufactured by stereolithography. On the other hand, in the short-term future it reveals new products to be available in the market, such as 3D printed blisk blades and 3D printed acoustic liners. Future lines of research should consider the integration of webscraping to identify subject-action-object structures in specialized webpages.