TPAC - Technology Policy and Assessment Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology

[National Science Foundation – Management of Technological Innovation Program Sponsored Project, 1998—2000; GT project #’s E24-T55 and M26-668]

The Georgia Tech Technology Policy and Assessment Center [TPAC] is working on a project to understand what information gleaned from extensive bibliographic searches can be of real value to various technology managers.

TPAC is collaborating with Search Technology, Inc.; Intelligent Information Services Corp. (IISC); and the U.S. Army Tank and Automotive Command (TACOM), with significant support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to develop an approach and software to analyze text information in support of technology management. Known as Technology Opportunities Analysis (TOA), this enables us to profile a target technology by analyzing sets of abstracts retrieved by searching on that technology in large electronic databases (e.g., EI Compendex, Science Citation Index, U.S. Patents). TOA allows us to identify "who is doing what" R&D relating to the target technology. We can represent various trends, technology maps, and innovation indicators. Over the past six years we have analyzed on the order of sixty technologies for various users, trying out different forms of reports and interactive presentations (e.g., allowing users to drill down into the abstract set to pursue lines of inquiry). We have also learned that putting such bibliometric analyses to use does not come automatically.

This NSF project allows us to step back and assess what technology information, presented in what form, can really facilitate technology management. Five organizations [Coca-Cola, NCR, TACOM, Edison House (Tri-Services Open Source Intelligence Unit in London), and Edison Institute (Special Interest Group on Glass)] have agreed to cooperate in assessing the utility of studies done using TOA. In this first year of the project, we are beginning by identifying a diverse set of technology managers in these organizations. We are questioning them on their current use of information concerning external technology development. We will then engage them in formulating and assessing three analyses: