MGT 513 Technology Forecasting and Assessment Week 14 November 23rd

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MGT 513 Technology Forecasting and Assessment
Week 14 November 23rd

• Dr. Steve Walsh

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Outline

• Porter, Chapters 15- 19
• Quiz 9

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Part III Assessment to Manage Technological
ChangeChapter 15 Impact Assessment
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• The effects of changing technology are of concern
  at two levels
• Technology forecast must attend to the impacts of
  the technologys introduction and adoption
• The technology manager needs to consider product
  acceptance by customers, indirect reactions by
  others, and potential regulation

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Technology Impact Assessment Uses

• Providing support for a technological development
• Deferring or stopping the implementation of a
  technology
• Stimulating research or development to remedy
  adverse effects of a technology
• Providing a reliable base of information for use
  by any parties concerned with the development of
  the technology

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Assessment Steps

• Problem definition
• Technology description
• Technology forecast
• Social context description, Social context
  forecast
• Impact identification
• Impact analysis
• Impact evaluation
• Policy analysis
• Communication of results

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Continued

• These steps should not be considered a linear
  progression some steps should be redone based on
  knowledge gained in subsequent steps
• These steps vary greatly among assessments in
  some cases, it may be appropriate to omit or
  truncate some steps

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Impact Assessment Scales

• Macroassessment full range of implications and
  policies considered in depth
• Miniassessment a narrow but in depth focus
• Microassessment a thought experiment, or
  brainstorming exercise, to identify the key
  issues
• Monitoring ongoing gathering of selected
  information on a topic
• Evaluation assessment of the performance of
  prior or ongoing projects and programs

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Impact Identification

• Prior to impact identification, the impact
  assessment process needs to establish baseline
  conditions
• Thats, the current situation and the likely
  future situation in the absence of the
  development in question

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Impact Identification Approaches

• Scanning techniques identify potential impacts
  by investigating the full range of candidate
  impacts in a single, direct step
• Tracing technique conduct structural
  relationships between development actions and
  impacts, and among impacts, creating a causal
  trail in which impacts become causes of
  higher-order effects

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Chapter 16 Analysis of the Impacts of
Technologies
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• There are eight technology driven impacts
  considered from the perspective of the technology
  manager
• Technological (scientific)
• Institutional (organizational)
• Social (behavioral)
• Cultural (values)
• Political (legal)
• International
• Environmental
• Health related

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Impacts on Technology

• Vertical impacts relate to the natural
  development and succession processes within a
  given family of technologies
• Example the progress from vacuum tube to the
  transistor to the integrated circuit
• Horizontal impacts result when advances one
  technology affect other technologies
• Example advances in automotive technology led to
  widespread use of automobiles, thereby creating a
  demand for technologies to abate pollution caused
  by automobiles

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Continued

• Integrative impacts
• refer to those that blend technological change
  with associated contextual changes
• The technology delivery system (TDS-chp.2) is
  useful here. It helps identify the interplay
  among institutions involved with given
  technologies

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Institutional/Organizational Impacts

• Internal organizational changes produced by
  change in the technology of a product or a
  process to secure maximum benefit from the new
  technology
• Example ATT shift from production of copper to
  optical fibers required different worker skills,
  therefore created pressure for managerial change
  and reorganization

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Continued

• External institutional changes influence and
  influenced by the technological enterprise
• Example the dissolution of the Congressional
  Joint Committee on atomic energy made nuclear
  power more vulnerable to its opponents

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Social Impacts

• Social impact assessment social impacts are
  those that alter the day-to-day quality of life
  of social groups, particularly families and
  communities where these impacts are most apparent
  
• Socioeconomic impact assessment employment is
  one of the biggest and important socioeconomic
  impacts that affect communities
• What about nano?

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Cultural and Behavioral Impacts

• Impacts of and on values
• Impact assessment deals with values and value
  changes as
• Criteria by which people evaluate the
  desirability of technological developments
• Changing contextual factors that can influence
  technological developments (impacts on)
• Affected by a technology (impacts of)
• Impacts on behavior concern changes induced in
  individuals (organization workers and technology
  users) due to technological changes

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Political/Legal Impacts

• Political impacts refer to how political power
  will be altered by development of a new
  technology
• Example the effects of the birth control pill
  and access to abortion on the progress of the
  womens movement
• Internet and China
• Legal analysis addresses the interaction between
  the law and the technological development in
  question
• Examples
• national sovereignty laws restrict the use of
  remote sensing
• Advancements in satellite technology spur
  development of relevant space rights sovereignty
  principles

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International Impacts

• International considerations in technological
  development
• Where to conduct RD (e.g in countries that have
  high concentration of scientists and engineers)
• IBM, INTEL (India and China)
• Where to produce (e.g in countries that provide
  low labor rates)
• Motorola China, NM VC go to Asia
• Where to market (e.g countries with high
  disposable incomes)

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Continued

• Impacts of development that transcend national
  boundaries
• Development of technologies that will affect the
  international community
• Example
• nuclear weapons
• Cloning
• Steam cells
• Nano

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Environmental Impacts

• Environmental impacts associated with todays
  technologies (such as information technologies)
  are less severe than those associated with old,
  intrusive, industrial technologies
• The major area of environmental concern include
  ecosystems, land use, water quality, air quality,
  noise, and radiation

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Health Impacts

• Health hazards include
• Failure of large scale technological systems
• Discrete, small scale accidents
• Low-level, delayed-effect hazards (e.g, cancers)
• Increases in infections or degenerative disease
  rate
• Is Nano safe

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Chapter 17 Benefit/Cost and Risk Analysis
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• Benefit/cost analysis helps technology managers
  in allocating scarce resources among alternative
  projects
• It helps to estimate the costs and benefits of
  developing new technologies
• It incorporates uncertainty through the use of
  risk analysis to assess the chances of success or
  failure

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Benefit/Cost Analysis

• Making a decision to invest in the development of
  a new technology implies answering critical
  questions
• Will the investment returns be large enough?
• How long should the manager be willing to
  continue committing money before profits begin?
• Will bankers or financial people within the
  company approve the needed investment?

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Accounting for Risk

• Because managers rarely have certainty about what
  will happen, risk should be introduced in the
  choice process of alternative projects
• Risk an action can result in more than one
  outcome, depending on external conditions with
  known probabilities of occurrence
• Uncertainty an action can result in more than
  one outcome, depending on external conditions
  with uknown probabilities

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Ways to Deal with Risk

• Make explicit risk estimates and use these to
  calculate expected values
• Use higher discount rates for riskier projects (
  higher returns always involve higher risks)
• Adopt a scenario strategy (chp.13)

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Chapter 18 Evaluation of Technologies and their
Impacts
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• Evaluation is the process of assigning value it
  requires criteria and measures
• Criteria reflects the values held by the
  evaluators or the parties whose judgment they are
  trying to address
• Measures reflect the degree to which criteria are
  met

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Evaluation Questions

• There are at least four questions to be asked in
  any evaluation
• Whats to be evaluated?
• Who is to be involved in the evaluation and what
  rates do they play?
• What criteria are to be used in the evaluation
  and how are they weighted?
• How are the criteria to be measured?

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Criteria

• Gastil (1977) suggests four essential values that
  underlie the criteria for technology evaluation
• Utility the greatest net social good
• Equity the evenness with which those social
  goods are distributed

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Continued

• Transcendence nonmaterial (spiritual) values
  that people hold dear
• Examples
• Ancient Greeks devoted much of their available
  resources to learning, architecture, and the arts
• Modern America devoted resources to space
  exploration
• These higher (transcendent) human attainments
  come at the
• expense of utility

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Continued

• Reverence another nonmaterial value that
  maintains the sacredness of certain
  considerations
• Example reverence may lower the utility of a
  straight highway in favor of respecting an Indian
  burial ground

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Alternatives

• Determining the set of alternatives to be
  considered is often a political decision. But the
  following ground rules can help avoid too large a
  set of alternatives
• Exclude clearly inferior alternatives
• Eliminate alternatives that are technically or
  economically infeasible
• Establish certain a priori minimal standards for
  alternatives to considered
• Seek to configure alternatives to be comparable
  in scale
• Try to have comparable levels of information
  available on all alternatives
• What about the Nicks Coach

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Measures

• There are four levels of measurement
• Nominal measures occur when a name or label is
  attached
• Example the numbers football players wear
• Ordinal measures relate to a ranking without
  clearly defined intervals between the entities
  being ranked
• Example chocolate ice cream tastes better than
  coffee ice cream to a certain individual

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Continued

• Internal measures the intervals between the
  entities being ranked are clearly defined
• Ratio measures are interval measures with a
  defined zero point

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Multiple Objective Methods

• Are decision tools that help evaluate
  alternatives and assist in the selection of
  preferred outcome
• A large variety of techniques have been developed
  for this purpose
• Non-dominated solution generating techniques
• Techniques involving a priori complete
  elicitation of preferences
• Techniques involving a priori partial elicitation
  of preferences
• Techniques involving the progressive elicitation
  of preferences
• Visual attribute level displays

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Chapter 19 Managing the Present from the Future
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• Managing present technological development that
  may causes future changes implies making
  decisions,
• These decisions are affected by the managers
  temporal perspectives
• One perspective interprets the present in light
  of past experience
• It tends to lock the decision maker into the
  framework of past organizational goals,
  strategies, and experiences by drawing on
  evaluation of prior experiences
• Its view of the future accentuates continuity, an
  extrapolation of that same past

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Continued

• Another perspective emphasize the present
• It stresses immediate solutions to pressing
  problems
• It underestimates long-term directions
• It places faith in market mechanisms

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Mega mistakes in Technology Forecasting
(Schnaars, 1989)

• Fascination with the exotic Tech forecasters
  exhibit a bias toward the optimistic and a
  disregard for the realities of the marketplace
• Enmeshed in the Zeitgeist everyone sees the same
  technologies as hot (devaluing expert consensus),
  and everyone emphasizes the same pressing
  societal needs
• Price-performance failures many technologies
  deliver lesser benefits at greater costs than
  anticipated
• Shifting social trends changing demographic
  trends and social values are not well considered
• Ultimate used unforeseen rarely do forecasters
  anticipate applications fully

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11 Commandments for Technology Forecasting

• Get the right technology
• Pick the right technological parameters
• Get the context right the different factors
  involved
• Beware of core assumption drag, due to technical
  myopia or ideological fixation
• Beware of the Zitgeist challenge the
  conventional wisdom

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Continued

• Keep the time horizon short
• Do it simply
• Use multiple approaches
• Perform sensitivity analyses
• Provide uncertainty estimates
• Take the middle path balance between far-out
  forecasts and too conservative assessments