Tech forecasting an empirical perspective

Abstract

Introduction In inviting these perspectives, Hal Linstone wrote that technology forecasting (TF) seems to have peaked around 1970 with a decline in methodological advance thereafter. That stimulated me to conduct a bibliometric analysis of TF activity over the past dozen years. Results support Hal’s contention, but also point toward “next wave” possibilities. Before digging into the data, it is worth considering what is different today from the earlier “heydey” periods for TF. In the 1950s and 1960s, TF was driven by military competition with the Soviet Union. TF was initiated primarily as a tool to help anticipate military technology needs and to help plan and prioritize R&D and systems development. Many of these technologies had long development times (for example, anti-ballistic missile program, new fighter planes). Today, military technology development has been supplanted by commercial technological competition as the primary motivator for TF. Competitive technological intelligence—a remarkable growth area of the 1990s—conjures images of companies, more than intelligence agencies, most actively trying to find out “who’s doing what.” This interest in tracking and forecasting others’ technology development has been heightened by tendencies to constrain corporate R&D to more immediate and more applied targets. In addition, both industry and government (even in the United States) evidence interest in trying to plan, prioritize, and evaluate their R&D programs, placing a premium on information about relative prospects and performance metrics. National technology foresight initiatives and industry or product technology road maps are important emerging forms of TF [30]. The defining characteristic of today’s technology is that we are in the Information Age. While cases could be made for various emerging technologies (for example, advanced materials, biotech) as flowering, it is clearly IT—information technology—that defines our era. That poses a challenge for TF in that typical IT life cycles are much shorter than military systems technology life cycles of 40 years ago. In addition to targeting rather different technological targets these days, TF draws on different resources. The availability of electronic information in several forms pro-