Future Oriented Technology Assessment

Comprehensive resource explaining how to evaluate technologies for different purposes in any industry using four different practical approaches By identifying emerging technology and application trends through analyses of published papers and patents, Future-Oriented Technology Assessment offers a comprehensive view of technology assessment structured into three different practical approaches: Technology Evaluation, Technology Roadmapping, and Technology Intelligence. The first three chapters include studies which utilize technology gap analysis, multiple criteria decision analysis, expert assessment quantification or neural networks to evaluate or forecast technology alternatives. The next four chapters use technology roadmapping, which charts a comprehensive plan for implementing technology. The final five chapters apply bibliometric analysis, patent analysis, and network analysis to identify technology trends and the leaders in the field. Additional topics covered in Future-Oriented Technology Assessment include: Smart grid technology as an alternative to fossil fuel consumption Heat pump water heaters that reduce the cost of energy and improve energy efficiency, with particular focus on research from the US and China Nanotechnology in construction in Saudi Arabia to improve heat insulation, energy efficiency, and tensile strength in green building designs With comprehensive, practical insight into evaluating emerging technologies across different industries, Future-Oriented Technology Assessment is an essential read for researchers in technology and professionals in engineering and technology management, along with professionals and graduate students in related disciplines and programs of study.

The application of foresight to address the challenges of uncertainty and rapid change has grown dramatically in the past decade. In that period, the techniques have been greatly refined and the scope has been broadened to encompass future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) and more recently, the concept and practice of strategic intelligence. FTA addresses directly the longer-term future through the active and continuous development of visions, and pathways to realise these visions. It is increasingly seen as a valuable management and policy tool complementing, and extending further into the future, classical strategy, planning, and decision-making approaches. This book charts the development of FTA and provides the first coherent description and analysis of its practical application and impact in the worlds of business, government, education and research in both advanced and developing countries. It draws on papers addressing the application of FTA around the globe which were presented at the Second International Seville Seminar in September 2006. The insights and practical experience will be invaluable for company managers, government ministers and officials, researchers and academics with responsibilities for effective planning and decision-making in an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable world.

"Understanding the technology dynamics is a required capability in today's technology driven industries. This volume focuses on three areas: technology assessment, technology forecasting and technology diffusion. It shows: an introduction to different types of assessment methods and applications from different sectors including energy, healthcare and communications; technology forecasting and foresight and a review of conventional and emerging methods; and the diffusion of technologies by exploring adoption of products and services from different sectors."--Back cover.

This book presents state-of-the-art intelligent methods and techniques for solving real-world problems and offers a vision of future research. Featuring 143 papers from the 4th Future Technologies Conference, held in San Francisco, USA, in 2019, it covers a wide range of important topics, including, but not limited to, computing, electronics, artificial intelligence, robotics, security and communications and their applications to the real world. As such, it is an interesting, exciting and inspiring read.

Using reviews of special reports and personal interviews with team members of recent National Science Foundation-sponsored assessments, the authors have assembled an eight-step functional strategy for conducting technology assessments. The steps are set within a framework that embodies the three key elements of all assessments: technology descripti

This book is open access under a CC-BY license. Policy-making to address grand challenges faces greater complexity than any previous project of modernization. Future scenarios are haunted by uncertainty and there is real ambivalence as to the values that policy should strive for. In this situation decision-makers look to research and innovation to provide answers and solutions. But neither can the great transitions ahead be planned by science, nor will conventional methods of innovation bring such transitions about. A turn to interactive governance is therefore underway with policy-makers and citizens becoming increasingly involved in processes of deliberating futures. Technology Assessment (TA) is the art of structuring such processes. TA goes beyond traditional expert policy analysis by systematically combining a multi-disciplinary evidence base with participatory approaches to policy deliberation. TA thus seeks to act as a hub for serious and transparent dialogue between policy, industry, science, and society about the challenges ahead and the available options for overcoming them responsibly. This volume offers an up-to-date account of the expansion of technology assessment capacities across new European member states. The contributions of this volume are written by leading European researchers and practitioners in technology assessment (TA) and are based on the PACITA (Parliaments and Civil Society in Technology Assessment) project.

This book systematically addresses the issue of assessing the normative nature of visions of emerging technologies in an epistemologically robust way. In the context of democratic governance of emerging technologies, not only it is important to reflect on technologies’ moral significance, but also to address their emerging and future oriented character. The book proposes an original approach to deal with the issue of “plausible” ethical evaluation of new technologies. Taking its start from current debates about Technology Assessment, the proposed solution emerges as a combination of theoretical and methodological insights from the fields of Philosophy of Technology, Science and Technology Studies and a normative justification based on pragmatist ethics. The book’s main contribution is to engage a diverse and interdisciplinary audience (ethicists, philosophers, social scientists, technology assessment researchers and practitioners) in a reflection concerning the epistemological challenges that are associated to the endeavour of appraising the moral significance of emerging technologies in the attempt of democratically governing them. It brings together concepts and methodologies from different disciplines and shows their synergy in applying them to two specific case studies of emerging biomedical technologies.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important element in creating competitive advantages for enterprises in different sectors. The authors guide readers through the different cases studies in order to present the benchmarking of international standards and CSR initiatives, as well as CSR performance evaluation practices. This book aims to identify current problems that can arise during CSR implementation in manufacturing and services companies. Moreover some best practice examples suitable for the introduction of CSR in the small and medium size companies will be described. The authors show how different stakeholders can benefit from sustainable resource management and pro-social behaviors. This book will be a valuable resource for both academics and practitioners who want to deepen their knowledge of CSR. This scientific monograph has been doubled blind reviewed.