Managing the challenge of emerging technologies: a review of the recent advances in methods and applications

Citation

Daim, T. (2013), "Managing the challenge of emerging technologies: a review of the recent advances in methods and applications", Foresight, Vol. 15 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/FS.27315faa.001

Managing the challenge of emerging technologies: a review of the recent advances in methods and applications

Article Type: Guest editorial From: foresight, Volume 15, Issue 6

Emerging technologies provide challenges and opportunities for governments and businesses. This special issue provides a set of papers providing approaches to deal with the challenges and leverage opportunities at different levels. The papers in this issue were selected from those presented at the recent Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) in Vancouver Canada.

There are five papers in this issue. As a whole, they present a valuable volume for policy and decision makers challenged with emerging technologies.

The first paper by Patana et al. studies the challenge at a policy makers’ level. They explore inducement and blocking mechanisms which may impact the Finnish innovation system. Their results are based on interviews done in the San Francisco Bay Area for benchmarking and in Finland for detailed analysis. Their results can be used for policy makers to facilitate innovation.

The second paper by Preschitschek et al. explores the same challenge at the industry level. They analyze patents for phytosterols to observe industry convergence. Their findings show semantic similarities among different fields indicating potential conversion.

Following two papers focus on a specific emerging technology. The technology of interest in both cases is renewable energy and specifically wind and solar technologies.

Paananen and Makinen use news media as a leading indicator of technology adoption and explore renewable energy. They focus on wind and solar energy and leverage news media in Germany and the UK.

Sick et al. leverage raw material prices to explain the diffusion of renewable energy. They use a regression model to test their approach. Their application on wind and solar proves to be successful.

Finally Güemes Castorena et al. introduce an integrated method for technological foresight based on several cases. While the paper introduce a step by step methodology, its review of multiple methods through cases would be useful for any program manager trying to start a foresight project involving emerging technologies.

Tugrul Daim
based at Portland State University, Portland, Oregan, USA.