An Analytical Approach to Building a Technology Development Envelope (TDE) for Roadmapping of Emerging Technology

Nathasit Gerdsri

ABSTRACT
In today’s environment, technologies are changing faster than ever and the global market competition is intense. For technological companies to survive, they look for R&D investment in emerging technologies as a key solution. Successful implementation of technologies that support new product development can strongly enhance a company’s competitiveness. However, due to funding constraints, companies must cautiously identify and evaluate technologies before they should invest.

This research provides an analytical model to help managers understand how technologies are evolving and how well different technologies fit their corporate strategy. The analytical model combines technology forecasting, identification, assessment, evaluation, and selection.

The Delphi method for obtaining expert opinion is applied to generate strategic information regarding potential emerging technologies including their estimated introduction date and metrics describing their performance and physical characteristics.

Emerging technologies are then evaluated using a hierarchical decision model with four levels: objective, criteria, factors, and technology alternatives. Comparative judgments provided by experts are analyzed to determine the relative priorities of the components in each level of the hierarchy. A new method for applying a semi-absolute scale to quantify the value of each technology is proposed to improve the determination of criteria priorities and the relative importance of the factors for each criterion. The overall impact of each technology on the company’s strategic objective is calculated as a composite index called Technology Value.

Technology development paths are specified by connecting technologies from one period to the next. The path connecting technologies with the highest value in each time period is defined as the “technology development envelope (TDE).” By investing in technologies following the TDE path throughout the specified timeframe, a company’s technological benefits will be maximized. The TDE and the various technology development paths serve as strategic inputs to the company’s technology roadmapping process.

To demonstrate the development of TDE, the research method is applied to emerging electronic cooling technologies, an industry that is currently in a technological transition period due to the volumetric thermal density limitation of the current technology—direct air cooling.

Determining the value of emerging technologies with respect to a company’s strategic objective is a valuable process in its own right. However, the results of this research go beyond that. They show that the proposed method leads to a technology development envelope and suggestions for possible technology development paths where none had existed previously. This method was developed using a rigorous systematic approach, and was subjected to various tests to show that the method is robust with respect to the variations in a company’s priorities

Thursday, June 3, 2004
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Dundar F. Kocaoglu, Chair
Tugrul U. Daim
Wayne W. Wakeland
Mark Weislogel
David Raffo, Graduate Studies Rep