Determine and Forecast Relationships: Major Analytic Methods

Abstract

Once the decision maker has clarified and assessed the values of technology portfolio selection and identified major innovative and relevant alternatives for the portfolio, he or she needs to determine the relationships between each resource allocation alternative and its impact on the values, as well as to forecast future changes in the relationships. To meet this need, ideally a set of comprehensive business, economic, environmental, and social-political models of these relationships should be developed, for which technology is only one major factor. However, such development is well beyond the scope of this book, and we will concentrate instead on:

• developing simplified near-term relationships between each resource allocation alternative for technology development or application and its direct impacts on the immediate values, such as profit, productivity, risks, local environmental effects, company reputation, and others

• forecasting future changes in the relationships through the use of intermediate relationships, such as technology capability, demand growth and market penetration of each technology portfolio alternative, which can then be used as the basis for estimating the overall business, economic, environmental, and socio-political impacts of each alternative