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This article sets out to investigate the relationship between the knowledge spillovers and the potential for high-value inventions to emerge. We study knowledge spillovers through the lens of knowledge networks: a web of interrelated knowledge elements with structural patterns. Knowledge spillovers influence the productivity of a technology sector and hence their pattern should impact the pathways for knowledge appropriation in the sector. It is hypothesized that a robust knowledge network is associated with knowledge appropriation leading to valuable inventions. We test the hypothesis using patent citation network of 1821 patents from 78 inventions belonging to two different technological sectors. Based upon the findings, we suggest network robustness as a new metric for determining the technical value of inventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the development trends of emerging technologies with disruptive potential as early as possible is crucial for enterprise research and development (R&D) investment planning and government R&D strategic planning. Many researchers have used academic papers and patent data to identify trends in emerging technologies, although they rarely have made use of web news data focused on emerging technologies. Web news contains a large amount of social awareness data that represents the public's sense of and response to emerging technologies, and the social awareness data is of great significance for identifying the development trends of emerging technologies. Therefore, this article presented a research framework to identify the development trends of emerging technologies using patent analysis and web news data mining. In the research framework, first, we have used patent analysis to analyze the evolution topics of these emerging technologies, and have applied the topic model to study the changing patterns of publics’ topics of concern regarding emerging technologies contained in web news. Second, we have made a comparison analysis of the results of patent analysis and the public’ sense of and response to emerging technologies contained in web news. Then, we have applied an improved sentiment analysis to study the changing patterns of publics’ expectations for emerging technologies contained in web news. Finally, by studying the changes in publics’ topics of concern and publics’ expectations for emerging technologies over time, we have identified the development trends of emerging technologies. The perovskite solar cells technology is used as a case study to analyze the effectiveness and feasibility of the framework. This article provides a new research perspective to identify technology trends, and contribute to the technology forecasting methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book describes how innovations can produce unintended effects that may take years to appear. The author is a well-known scientist and policy analyst whose interdisciplinary research interests encompass energy, food, population, economic, historical, and public policy studies. The author offers a few words to distinguish between the notions of invention and innovation. "The meanings have a large overlap, but innovation is perhaps best understood as the process of introducing, adopting, and mastering new materials, products, processes, and ideas." The book presents detailed descriptions of inventions that fall into three categories: 1) ones that delivered the advertised performance, but with undesirable follow-on consequences; 2) ones that were expected to dominate their markets, but never did; and 3) ones we would like to see succeed, but have not yet achieved their objectives. A final chapter examines current optimistic predictions of what technology could achieve and how fast these advances are likely to happen. It ends with a discussion of what types of innovation are really most needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern society, science and technology has become the core competitiveness of a company or a country. Discovering the development trajectory a technological domain is of great significance. In this article, we propose a framework to answer this question by analyzing the semantics of patent texts and the citation relationships among patents, because patents in a specific technological domain provide rich resources of technological development process. First, we collect the patent data of a specific domain from the database of United States Patent and Trademark Office. Second, we extract different topics from these patents’ texts by Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Third, an index for evaluating the correlation between two patents is defined according to the semantic similarities and citation relationship between them. Fourth, we found the global and local important patents through the global and local important index (LII). Finally, we discover some community of the network constructed by the important patents filtered by LII and statistical analysis methods to obtain some meaningful results. Furthermore, we take the patents in the technological domain of robotics as an example to examine the proposed method and reveal the technological development trends in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3-D printing is an additive manufacturing process, which enables products to be custom designed. Obtaining the evolution trend and identifying the potential R&D hotspots of 3-D printing technology are important strategic issues for both nations and enterprises. In this article, a combination method is proposed using the Viterbi algorithm to identify technological terms in patents, using the latent Dirichlet allocation model to capture potential technological topics in patents, and using the hidden Markov model to analyze the distribution and evolution pattern of the technological topics. Based on the results, technological topics and future R&D hotspots in 3-D printing are identified. Among the technological topics, extrusion devices and laser powder molding are gradually losing R&D; model acquisition, extrusion devices, rotary printing, and denture are the key topics of technological evolution that are difficult to overcome; laser focusing, print head, color printing, recyclable, feeding, control panel, and denture will become the focus of R&D in the near future. Finally, a comparison and experiments are given to demonstrate the plausibility of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology forecasting not only helps business managers to make the right decisions but also helps researchers to grasp the direction of technology development. Technology forecasting, which facilitates the identification of the development technologies with high potential, can be an effective tool to support the management and plan for the future research activities. For this purpose, this paper firstly constructs Multi-modal input based on deep learning (MIDL) text classification model to extract relevant SCI papers from Web of Science database from 1996 to 2019 for topic classification, and then apply the Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks to build an EEMD-LSTM technology forecasting model to predict the future development of each research field. Besides, we verify the validity of the method by taking robotics as an example in this paper. The results show that the accuracy, recall and F1 of MIDL text classification model are 0.826, 0.822 and 0.824 respectively. As compared with the optimal results of other classification models, the accuracy, recall and F1 are improved by 4.1%, 3.5%, and 3.8% respectively. The mean MAPE of the EEMD-LSTM model is 7%, which is 11% lower than ARIMA, 8% lower than LSTM, and 10% lower than 2-layer-LSTM.

By reviewing the 70 years of AI, this article summarizes and discusses the paradigm transformations from the age of AI before the year 2000 to the new age of AI from the year 2000 onward. It reviews the AI thinking and features of various AI generations and paradigms during these two ages of AI and their transformations. The paper further summarizes several AI Formulas from the AI vision, system, goal, task, and process perspectives. Several important areas are highlighted in developing AI Futures: shrinking the gaps between human, natural and social AI, and developing human-like/level AI, meta AI, reflective AI, metasynthetic AI, data-driven AI, beyond 'IID AI,' actionable AI, and sustainable AI. In the new age of AI, we encourage your deep thinking of AI futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this special is to offer the interested audience an overview of the most recent advancements in information and communication technologies that can enable the "New Space" vision, turning it from a conceptual design philosophy to real system implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on trends and future market developments predicted for connected and autonomous vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the impact of 5G mobile communications in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ericsson expects the global number of 5G subscriptions to exceed 190 million by the end of 2020 and 2.8 billion by the end of 2025. The forecast is included in the June 2020 edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report [1], along with projections for data traffic growth and regional 5G subscriptions. The report also takes a sharp look at the role of networks and digital infrastructure in keeping societies running and families connected during the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 has prompted people around the world to change their daily lives and, in many cases, work or study from home. This has led to a rapid shift of network traffic from business to residential areas. The latest Ericsson Mobility Report shows that mobile and fixed networks are increasingly an even bigger part of critical national infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the evolution of technology trends in education from 2010 to 2015, using as input the predictions made in the Horizon Reports on Higher Education, published yearly since 2004. Each edition attempts to forecast the most promising technologies likely to impact on education along three horizons: the short term (the year of the report), the midterm (the following two years), and the long term (the following four years). This paper applies social analysis, based on Google Trends, and bibliometric analysis, with data from Google Scholar and Web of Science, to these predictions in order to discover which technologies were successful and really impacted mainstream education, and which ones failed to have the predicted impact and why. This paper offers guidelines that may be helpful to those seeking to invest in new research areas.

The articles in this special section focus on the history and future technological development of microprocessors. Microprocessors have become more pervasive than any other landmark invention of the entire human civilization including the wheel, in spite of arriving a few millennia later. Many pioneers who have helped shape this amazing journey of microprocessors from its birth in 1971 to its omnipresence today share their perspectives in this special issue. Industry leaders in commemorating the special anniversary are keen to continue these innovations to an even greater extent and broader societal impact. It has been a remarkable journey from a few hundred transistors to new machine learning engines that occupy an entire wafer with more than a trillion transistors. The journey has had its share of drama and intense competition, both technical and legal. However, in this issue, the entire industry has come together to celebrate this landmark event for microprocessors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who have recently published a book looking at the intersection of science, technology, and society must wish that they could have delayed its appearance. As I write this in the summer of 2020, the world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and is looking for a medical fix, a life-saving vaccine. The public’s faith in science and technology has never been higher. Computer “apps” that explore things such as the frequency of, and point of origin of, COVID-related Google search terms, and Twitter posts, are being used to trace the progress of the virus and to predict the sites of further outbreaks. The United States has been roiled by the death, at the hands of the police, of George Floyd. Floyd’s killing was captured by an app that has been circulating throughout the globe that has acquired the near iconic power of the crucifixion. With the majority of the American people equipped to make audio–visual recording of police brutality and post them on social media, we expect that crimes such as this will certainly diminish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the greatest compliments I've ever received came from a gentleman who approached me after I had delivered a paper in Vancouver, British Columbia. He said: "You're from the future, aren't you?" He was responding to the manner in which I had considered logical entailments of how future episodes may play out. Although I was trained as a philosopher of science, the majority of my work for the last two decades has been interdisciplinary and collaborative with other fields in the social and physical sciences. As a pioneer in my field - sometimes referred to as experimental philosophy - I often employ the use of thought experiments or "what if?" scenarios to imagine possible future worlds. Thought experiments have been around for thousands of years; from Plato's allegory of the cave (Figure 1), to Rene Descartes' malin genie (Figure 2), to Hilary Putnam's brains in vats (Figure 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

World building exists at the intersection of design, technology, and storytelling. In its ability to enable and conjure deeply considered holistic worlds, it represents the foundational narrative and design practice for transmedia, spherical storytelling, and the post-cinematic. World building takes a lateral anthropological stance, borrowing specifically from ethnographic practice to contextualize speculative designs in real world research. World builders as designers then use this ethnographic groundwork as a place from which to begin imagining future possibilities [5, pp. 2-3]. This process allows designers to intelligently project plausible scenarios and outcomes through the creation of diegetic prototypes and models [3, p. 190] backed by rigorous research, envisioning desirable futures and the steps we may take to realize them - or the parallel universes we may be grateful to prevent. This essay is a case study that illustrates the use of world building as a "technology of the imagination" - entering a tradition of many other technologies of the imagination as elaborated by Sneath et al. and Halse - that envisions the future of media and technology [3, p. 182]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience of posthuman transformation of technologies that resulted in extinction of human spirit.

In 2018, much attention was paid to the 200th anniversary of the publication of one of the most popular novels in the English language, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Her achievement is the more remarkable in that it occurred when there were very few known English female authors. Indeed, when the book appeared it carried no author's name. Popular from the start, it went through several editions and revisions — the writer was revealed to the public in the second edition. She was the wife of the renowned poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and had started writing the book at age 18; it came out two years later. It's interesting that the first major science fiction novel was written by a woman and perhaps significant that it presents a dark vision of scientific experimentation. That M.I.T. has chosen to bring out a new heavily annotated edition at this moment in history is both appropriate and not surprising. We are in an age of hyper-sensitivity to issues of technological hubris as well as fear of the unintended consequences of technology. Who hasn't heard of "Frankenfood" — genetically modified nourishment, which in our more paranoid moments, we imagine having been created by mad scientists in industrial laboratories who are poisoning our bodies and environment. And our present concern over the possibility of "designer babies" has close parallels in the novel's plot. Virtually every other page of this edition carries footnotes, which were provided by a team of around 30 professors, grad students, sci-fi writers, and post docs. In addition, the book concludes with seven critical essays — some of them quite provocative — which will be an aid to any professor who chooses to assign this book designed for classroom study by undergraduates in STEM courses. Strange to say, despite its publisher and subject matter none of the contributors is from M.I.T. The three principal editors are at Arizona State University. There are now several other 200th anniversary editions in print, including one from Literary Folio that includes facsimiles of the 1818 and 1831 editions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's 80?F and sunny, an exquisitely warm day even by California standards. Douglas Rushkoff is driving up the coast to Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters, when I reach him over Skype to talk about his newest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Examines the future for cloud gaming services. These services have leveraged real-time video streaming technologies that have a long history of development. Cloud gaming refers to the technologies that offload parts of game software from traditional game consoles or personal computers (PCs) to powerful and elastic cloud infrastructures. Cloud gaming makes perfect sense to: 1) gamers, who otherwise have to constantly upgrade their consoles or PCs, which is certainly no fun and costly; 2) cloud service providers, who can sell the already-deployed and idling cloud resources to support the cutting-edge games that are extremely resource hungry; and 3) game developers, who no longer need to spend months to port their games to different platforms. As such, cloud gaming has attracted significant attention from both academia and industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some important, long-term, social and economic challenges that we face can potentially be addressed by existing and emerging technologies. This article draws on the future technology growth trends and technology lists identified by Evans [3] in the paper ?Securing Australia?s Future ? Future Technology Overview.? Our focus is on how technological change can be channeled to address the critical challenges of our time and how we can shape the new and emerging technologies and systems to address these challenges. We include a list of basic technology advances that will, within the next ten years, underpin a large range of application technologies. We then identify some of the critical issues facing society, such as urbanization, water, and climate change, and discuss how the convergence of underpinning technologies can be shaped to address these issues. While the paths of technological change cannot always be predicted and impacts are highly uncertain, there are some clearly emerging trends, which point to real possibilities of steering technology in the direction of addressing critical societal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last two years, nine IEEE Computer Society tech leaders collaborated to identify important industry advances that promise to change the world by 2022. The 23 technologies provide new insights into the emergence of "seamless intelligence." [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents a set of recommendations based on inputs from robotics, computer science, philosophy, ethics, and law experts for the development of artificial agents. These recommendations include the need to understand artificial agents as socio-technical systems consisting of artifacts and social practices, and the importance of addressing responsibility issues when artificial agent technologies are in the early stages of development.

This contribution provides a review of fundamental goals, development and future perspectives of driver assistance systems. Mobility is a fundamental desire of mankind. Virtually any society strives for safe and efficient mobility at low ecological and economic costs. Nevertheless, its technical implementation significantly differs among societies, depending on their culture and their degree of industrialization. A potential evolutionary roadmap for driver assistance systems is discussed. Emerging from systems based on proprioceptive sensors, such as ABS or ESC, we review the progress incented by the use of exteroceptive sensors such as radar, video, or lidar. While the ultimate goal of automated and cooperative traffic still remains a vision of the future, intermediate steps towards that aim can be realized through systems that mitigate or avoid collisions in selected driving situations. Research extends the state-of-the-art in automated driving in urban traffic and in cooperative driving, the latter addressing communication and collaboration between different vehicles, as well as cooperative vehicle operation by its driver and its machine intelligence. These steps are considered important for the interim period, until reliable unsupervised automated driving for all conceivable traffic situations becomes available. The prospective evolution of driver assistance systems will be stimulated by several technological, societal and market trends. The paper closes with a view on current research fields. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Electricity grids are in a transition phase. With the rise of renewable energy, energy "prosumers," and electric vehicles, traditional models of matching supply and demand are no longer adequate. Grid pilot projects can help identify ways to improve cybersecurity in future grids. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With Web 2.0 advances, social computing has become an emerging research field in the past decade. This article analyzes the characteristics of social computing research from both static and dynamic perspectives. First, the authors present the overlapping relationships of content represented by keywords as of 2011. Next, they show the dynamics of social computing research through analyzing keyword trends and topological evolution of co-word networks. The article characterizes the key features and the evolution of social computing from a quantitative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As technological, economic, and social factors drive scientific publishing toward electronic formats, opportunities open beyond traditional reading and writing frameworks. Journal articles now, and in the future, can increasingly include a variety of supplemental multimedia and interactive materials for augmented reading that will impact both the nature and presentation of scientific research. The IEEE Computer Society is preparing for this evolution. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/06J3yg0SV8o is a video that serves as a short abstract of the paper "Augmented Reading: The Present and Future of Electronic Scientific Publications," presented by the two authors with the support of two young promising scientists. The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/86nN1gCMc1E is a video by David Alan Grier (IEEE Computer Society President, 2013) that discusses the Computer Society and its plans for scientific publications. The third Web extra at http://youtu.be/GCCMYR5Zy70 is a video that collects the personal views of Dejan Milosevic (IEEE CS President, 2014), David A. Grier (IEEE CS President, 2013), Sorel Reisman (IEEE CS President, 2012), Jon Rokne (IEEE CS Publications), Fabrizio Lombardi (EIC IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing and member of the IEEE CS Board of Governors), and Steve Woods (IEEE CS Senior Manager Multimedia, Production) about the future of scientific publications. The fourth Web extra at http://youtu.be/7cLNV4SNdjY is a video presentation of the multimedia enhancements Computer magazine offers to its readers each month. The fifth Web extra at http://youtu.be/4csCKb685XQ is a video that presents a collection of definitions for the term "supplemental material." The sixth Web extra at http://youtu.be/d7a7XxMT6eY is a video that reviews the announcement from the Journal of Neuroscience that authors can no longer submit supplemental material. The seventh Web extra at http://youtu.be/NMFwLJhv11c is a video in which author Paolo Montuschi summarizes the key concepts of the article "Augmented Reading: The Present and Future of Electronic Scientific Publications". [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When it comes to BME today, innovation might just be the most important buzzword around. That?s not because it happens to be the trend of the day across industries already; it?s because in the face of skyrocketing health care costs, a rapidly aging global population, and multiplying cases of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, we have no other choice. If our goal is ultimately to create a healthier, more vibrant global society, we must innovate?and radically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When it comes to predicting the future, everyone has their own approach. Weather forecasters track changing pressure systems, economists study the markets, and doctors wrestle with patient risk factors. And here at IEEE Pulse? Over the last few months, we?ve talked to experts in the field, asked IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society members for input, and scanned through the past year?s research breakthroughs to identify what we think might be the hottest biomedical engineering areas to watch in 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ray tracing on massively parallel hardware allows for the computation of images with a high visual quality in an increasingly short time. However, apping the computations to such architectures in an efficient manner is a challenging task. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A century of revolutionary growth in aviation has made global travel a reality of daily life. Aircraft and air transport overcame a number of formidable challenges and hostilities in the physical world. Success in this arduous pursuit was not without leveraging advances of the “cyber” layer, i.e., digital computing, data storage and networking, and software, in hardware, infrastructures, humans, and processes, within the airframe, in space, and on the ground. The physical world, however, is evolving continuously in the 21st century, contributing traffic growth and diversity, fossil fuel and ozone layer depletion, demographics and economy dynamics, as some major factors in aviation performance equations. In the next 100 years, apart from breakthrough physical advances, such as aircraft structural and electrical designs, we envision aviation's progress will depend on conquering cyberspace challenges and adversities, while safely and securely transitioning cyber benefits to the physical world. A tight integration of cyberspace with the physical world streamlines this vision. This paper proposes a novel cyber–physical system (CPS) framework to understand the cyber layer and cyber–physical interactions in aviation, study their impacts, and identify valuable research directions. This paper presents CPS challenges and solutions for aircraft, aviation users, airports, and air traffic management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IDEAS event, hosted by Autodesk, brought together a collection of scientists, astronauts, engineers, science fiction authors, and thinkers to use science fiction prototyping and determine what design should imagine. The first Web extra at http://youtu.be/ee4V6b4AauY is an audio recording that discusses how the IDEAS event, hosted by Autodesk, brings together a collection of scientists, astronauts, engineers, science fiction authors, and thinkers to use science fiction prototyping and determine what design should imagine. The second Web extra at http://youtu.be/Wqvx60EPkQY is an audio in which Brian David Johnson interviews professional technologist Ramez Naam at the IDEAS event, hosted by Autodesk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the Centennial Special Issue of the "Proceedings of the IEEE" is presented.

The article reviews the periodical "Proceedings of the IEEE."

The author reflects on a series of future predictions written by fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and published in the 1962 issue of the "Proceedings of the IEEE." He cites the role of exponential change in the field of electronics, as exemplified by the invention of the integrated circuit, and the development of the Picturephone and the millimeter wave guide from Bell Labs in 1962. Future technologies will be created as a response to increasing needs.

The author focuses on technological and engineering advances in 1912 and 2112, which the author believes are founded on the needs of global civilization. He is the opinion that discoveries and inventions are the bases of changes in the field of technology, primarily by the introduction of digitization, nanotechnology and biotechnology. He predicts these advances would have an impact on health care and medicine, telecommunication, energy and other industries, design and human interface.

The article discusses various papers published in various sections of this journal including one by Heydt et al. on electric power and energy engineering, one by Kezonuvic et al. on smart grid and one by Froyd et al. on engineering education.

Over the past 20 years, the world has seen significant advances in and adoption of new technology, political events that have led to the opening of formerly closed societies, economic policies that have encouraged free trade, and the growth in multinational companies. These changes have resulted in a world with increased connectedness and interdependencies and a globalization of the workforce. This paper discusses the impact globalization has had on engineering and engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The social implications of a wide variety of technologies are the subject matter of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). This paper reviews the SSIT's contributions since the Society's founding in 1982, and surveys the outlook for certain key technologies that may have significant social impacts in the future. Military and security technologies, always of significant interest to SSIT, may become more autonomous with less human intervention, and this may have both good and bad consequences. We examine some current trends such as mobile, wearable, and pervasive computing, and find both dangers and opportunities in these trends. We foresee major social implications in the increasing variety and sophistication of implant technologies, leading to cyborgs and human–machine hybrids. The possibility that the human mind may be simulated in and transferred to hardware may lead to a transhumanist future in which humanity redesigns itself: technology would become society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It's the time of year for "top 10" lists. Most such lists are very technology or tool centric and can be more visionary than practical. Few address the softer skills and issues that today's CIOs face. This department offers two top 10 lists for 2011—one on tech trends and the other on strategic capabilities. They include trends that span beyond IT and improve both the execution and integration of IT across the entire enterprise constituent pool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solid-state lighting is a rapidly evolving technology, now virtually certain to someday displace traditional lighting in applications ranging from the lowest-power spot illuminator to the highest-power area illuminator. Moreover, it has considerable headroom for continued evolution even after this initial displacement. In this paper, we present a high-level overview of solid-state lighting, with an emphasis on white lighting suitable for general illumination. We characterize in detail solid-state lighting's past and potential-future evolution using various performance and cost metrics, with special attention paid to inter-relationships between these metrics imposed by human factors, technology, and economic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the societal benefits of technology to enhance our lives. Presents a commentary on the research and works of theoretical physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Michio Kaku, who explores the future of of brain science and technology. While Kaku acknowledges the double-edged sword character to both science and technology, writing that ?One side of the sword can cut against poverty, disease, and ignorance, but the other side can cut against people?, the main thrust of his book lies in celebrating the soaring positive possibilities of brain science. In this, Kaku, with some reservations, follows the conventional wisdom that any technology that eliminates effort, that makes life easier or more convenient, that responds instantly to our every wish and command is, ipso facto, good. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite being a strong stimulus for the invention of new alternatives, morphology analysis (MA) suffers the limitations of being a nonquantitative, vague, and static methodology. As a consequence, the MA outcomes typically do not provide practical technology opportunities. This paper, therefore, proposes a new hybrid approach that enhances the performance of MA by combining it with conjoint analysis (CA) and citation analysis of patent information. First, keywords are extracted from patent documents using text mining, and the morphology of existing patents is identified by these keywords. Alternatives for new technology development from among the emerging technologies are presented by combining the valuable levels of each attribute in a morphology matrix predefined by domain experts. Then, configurations of new technology are suggested in order of priority using CA, and the technological feasibility of each new configuration is subsequently investigated. The technological competitiveness of a company can be analyzed by a newly suggested index, ‘technology share,’ which is analogous to the concept of market share in traditional CA. The proposed MA-CA hybrid process is illustrated with a case example of patent information from the thin film transistor-liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) patent database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the upstream flow of product attribute forecast information often used to drive the technology planning process. It is noted that, while downstream customers are willing to pay for Improvements in key product attributes, they do not always provide accurate and timely product attribute fore- casts to upstream suppliers. As a result of this increasing distortion of product attribute, demand as information flows upstream, upstream suppliers often either fail to develop technology that will be needed In the marketplace or develop technology that ultimately is unused. This is shown to be a strategic, technology planning analog to the tactical, order decision problem of order quantity bullwhip observed in the field of supply chain management. As such, we define the technology planning problem under consideration here as "product attribute bullwhip." Based on solutions employed to address order quantity bullwhip in supply chain management, we propose a methodology to reduce product attribute bullwhip by comparing product attribute information obtained directly from the end user with that which flows upstream through the supply chain. To Illustrate this effect, we apply the proposed methodology to an example from the wireless communication industry by comparing trends in the perceived value of cellular telephone handset face area with trends In the perceived value of face area observed at the component level of the supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]