A framework for identifying and evaluating technologies of interest for effective business strategy: Using text analytics to augment technology forecasting

Abstract

Shifts in technology can bring dramatic changes in the competitive positioning of an organization. On the one hand it provides opportunities to create new value propositions and thus opportunity to grow, but on the other hand it also threatens the existence of organizations that fail to grasp the scale and/or significance of given technological change. Technology intelligence and forecasting have long been used to evaluate and forecast the potential characteristic, rate and effects of technological change. In this paper, we argue for the position that unstructured text provides a rich source of data that can be used for forecasting emerging technologies. A framework is developed to leverage the capabilities of text anaytics techniques to augment methods used for technology forecasting.