ISE 559: Technology Audit And Technology Assessment

ISE 559: Technology Audit & Technology Assessment

Individual Term Project: Impact of Technology Foresight

Name: Lau Yun Lung Student ID: 15032634G

Introduction

This report studies the impact of the technology foresight through using the knowledge that I learned from five related academic and professional journals and applying to the company that I chose.

The review and summary of the selected articles

According to "Technology Foresight for Competitive Advantage" by J. Anderson, the discussion between people in R&D and 'users' of the research outcome, like people in industry and different public services, is required as to lead to new perspectives on R&D priorities. The reason is that the R&D may be good at judging on the feasible elements

Barker and D. J. H. Smith, which talks about using roadmaps is an approach to present the outcomes of the foresight analysis in visual form. Using roadmaps has some advantages, like easy to understand, good to compress complex and large information into a small space, and helpful to check the process for consistency of the data. The roadmaps are used to represent the information involved throughout the foresight process, and then present it to the staff for getting feedbacks and obtaining their participation in the contribution of consensus. Also, they are built in top-down and bottom-up modes. A roadmap can be divided into two part. The first part (on figure 2) is analyzing business strategy, like strategic goals, mission and vision, which leads to identify the key technical themes that can help deliver those aims. The next part (on figure 3) is identifying research, development and engineering programmes, which include underpinning or research needed to enable the commercial goals to be met. Besides, the roadmaps can be used for different purpose, like letting management level to identify core areas that they should maintain total competitiveness, and helping convince management level that the money is well spent on the R&D projects. In short, the visual feature of roadmaps can help a lot in discussion between different staff involved about shaping the future R&D projects, and also let them identify how a new, unexpected

First, technology roadmapping is necessary to demonstrate the company objective, and how to achieve the goals for the future, just like Figure 2 shown. It requires to identify market and industry trends, customers (i.e. drivers) that impact future requirements about the car accessories, and the associated technology needs and opportunities.

At that time, consultation is needed to develop perspectives on expected, possible and preferred futures on a long term basis, like 5-10 years. To develop such perspectives on these future, the huge effort on marketing research cannot be avoided. It is because we need to know the current trend of the market and industry from the marketing staff. Consultation is good to generate the process benefits of communication between staffs from different fields, enabling different staffs to form productive R&D partnerships, and encouraging the staffs involved to know the changes happening in our