Technology Investment Radar: A Tool to Automatically Track Technology Maturation

In this paper, we present a prototype application -- the technology investment radar -- to systematically and continuously track the maturity of technologies using information on the Web to inform investment decisions. This prototype achieves this capability by integrating a variety of AI and semantic technologies in a novel way. These technologies include an inference engine, semantic models, and various NLP/NLU approaches. We evaluate the performance of this prototype through a pilot with Accenture's Wireless Community of Practice. The results from the pilot are encouraging as the Technology Investment Radar's maturity assessments for the technologies tracked are comparable to those given by the human analysts. We also assess the utility of the system from an end user perspective. Our assessment reveal that the majority of the analysts found the system to be useful and will continue to use it after the pilot, demonstrating the practical value of the system.