Functional technology foresight. A novel methodology to identify emerging technologies

Abstract

The speed and complexity of the technology evolution faced by modern societies need new approaches to the analysis and understanding of the world. Indeed, an exclusive focus on technological goals can miss to recognize all the stakeholders of a technology and address real user needs; moreover, on the one hand low signals are becoming more and more important in fast evolving markets, on the other hand the excess of hype, fashions, or vested interests sometimes deeply alter indicators. However, the so called Big Data promise to be a huge low cost set of valuable information, available and affordable to all (SMEs included). But, analyzing them is not trivial especially if we deal with academic papers and patents. To tackle these issues, the present paper proposes to apply a powerful methodological tool called Functional Analysis to the Technology Foresight process. Actually the rigorous study of the functions, that an artefact should perform to satisfy the user needs, provides a universal and thus unifying point of view, which is able to correlate the user perspective on the product with its technical features. Functional reasoning has been applied to (i) detect possible patterns of development, spotting missing elements and highlighting strengths as well as potential sources of failure; (ii) to enhance traditional bibliometric tools such as the analysis of S-curves and (iii), integrated with a natural language processing analysis toolchain, tailored for patent documents, to identify emerging technologies. The paper describes the functional approach to technology foresight activity, presents how to integrate it with text mining algorithms and experts' domain knowledge, and finally discusses its benefits in the context of Technology Foresight also from an economic point of view, showing that oresight is affordable also for Small and Medium Enterprises.

Semantic TRIZ feasibility in technology development, innovation, and production: A systematic review

“… requirement-oriented taxonomies USPTO Tokenization Stop Words Stemming term weighting Information Gain (IG) TF-IDF Vector Space Model (VSM) Decision tree (DT) Naïve Bayes (NB) Support Vector Machine (SVM) Accuracy, Precision, Recall and F-measure A25. Incorporating functional research and bibliometrics into the technology prediction [ 53 ]. S-curves industry publications, newsletters, websites Tokenization POS-tagged lemmatization domain–specific terms were weighted with the C-NC value – Functional Maps and also big bibliometric data analysis A26.…”

Blockchain Enablers for Supply Chains: How to Boost Implementation in Industry

“…S-curves can be adopted to assess technologies [27]- [29], as such incremental improvements will move along a given S-curve, but radically new technologies will jump from one S-curve to another [27]. S-curves identify the maturity of the technology and when and if the 'jump' will happen.…”

“…These aspects can generate unpredictable risks in industrial sectors where communities need proper technology assessments to forecast and set-up the technology in business processes and operations [4], [5], [29]. Thus, the research gap we want to enclose within this study is the discordance between the degree of disruptiveness and the results of real industrial implementations thus far.…”

“…According to Christensen's theory, there are specific features for identifying innovations and market trends, dividing the scenario into two possibilities: sustaining innovation vs. disruptive innovation [8]. In addition, in line with [27]- [29], S-curve positioning has been considered an important tool to be applied. Following C. Pérez's paradigms, we focus on dominant design [76]- [78], technology systems and trajectories [28], [79].…”

Future indoor light and associated energy consumption based on professionals' visions: A practice- and network-oriented analysis

“…Moreover we build on the finding that mapping of network relations, i.e., interdependencies between elements can constitute a central method dimension in foresight and scenarios analyses (Davis and Pyper, 2015;Magruk, 2011;Nugroho and Saritas, 2009). In addition, our methodology can be seen as related to the 'functional' foresight perspective that focuses on functions of technologies in the use context (Apreda et al, 2016(Apreda et al, , 2014.…”