Technology mapping, business strategy, and market opportunities

✍ Scribed by Pere Escorsa Castells; Marisela Rodriguez Salvador; Ramon Maspons Bosch

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Weight: 179 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1058-0247
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6386(200031)11:1<46::aid-cir7>3.0.co;2-v

✦ Synopsis

Businesses wishing to stay competitive and keep up-to-date must use new instruments of analysis that allow for early detection of opportunities and threats. Technological intelligence (TI) is intended precisely as a way of obtaining information as to what is occurring in a particular technological area-what subjects research is being done in, what the emerging research lines are, which are the leading companies and research teams, and so on. Within the sphere of TI, technology maps, obtained by means of processing the information contained in patent and technical article databases, are a powerful tool for analyzing technological trends. But the results they yield are not sufficient for strategic decision-making at the company level if they cannot be tied in with market behavior. Though methodologies have already been defined for obtaining technological maps, little has been done up until now to study their connections with the market. This article is intended to give an overview of the application of these maps and their relationship with market analyses for detecting technological opportunities. The authors start from the maps obtained analyzing the sector of "Industrial Medical Fabrics," in a study undertaken as part of the European Commission's Leonardo Program (Escorsa, Maspons, & Rodrı ´guez, 1998) and then go on to design a methodology incorporating the data from market studies.