A Research Forum for Technology
Commercialization and Economic Logistics
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A Research Forum for Technology
Commercialization and Economic Logistics |
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From the back cover of the book: "TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZATION examines both general Research &Development commercialization and targeted new product innovation. New product development is a major occupation of the technical sector of the global economy and is viewed in many ways as a means of economic stability for a business, an industry, and a country. The heart of the book is a detailing of the analytical methods - - with special, but not exclusive emphasis on DEA methods - - for evaluating and ranking the most promising R&D and technical innovation being developed. The sponsors of the research and development may involve universities, countries, industries, and corporations - - all of these sources are covered in the book. In addition, the trade-off of environmental problems vis-à-vis new product development is discussed in a section of the book. Sten Thore (editor and author) has woven together the chapter contributions by a strong group of international researchers into a book that has characteristics of both a monograph and a unified edited volume of well-written papers in DEA, technology evaluation, R&D, and environmental economics. The book's emphasis on methods for evaluative ranking the multiple dimensions of research and development makes the book useful for a wide audience of researchers, students, and practitioners. Finally, the use of DEA as an evaluation method for product innovation is an important new development in the field of R&D commercialization." Excerpts from the Foreword by Robert Ronstadt, director, IC2 Institute, The University of Texas at Austin: "You
won’t read about it in the Sunday Times, but I’m predicting that the
application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) will be seen in the years ahead
as a major achievement in the history of technology commercialization... IC2
Institute has regularly supported the early theoretical work and the subsequent
applications work of DEA over the last two decades.
We’ve done so because we believed this work has the potential to
improve the efficacy of: 1) national and corporate research laboratories; 2)
university research investments; 3) venture incubator portfolios; 4) venture
capital portfolios; and, in fact, any portfolio where choices must be made about
capital allocations. In
fact, this array of applications is telltale.
They reveal that this extremely readable book is more than one more step
in the arduous journey to quantify research and development (R&D) projects.
Despite the limitation of the book’s subtitle, Technology
Commercialization is much more. From
my perspective, this book is part of a larger movement whose outline is now
barely visible on the horizon, a movement whose goal is more than the
demonstration of a new quantitative technique, but part of an effort to create
an entirely new discipline around a critical wealth producing process known as
technology commercialization... Technology
commercialization can be defined simply as “the movement of ideas from the
research laboratory to the market place.”
The value of this simple definition is its ease of understanding. People
can be perplexed about “technology commercialization,” but they generally
comprehend that the “lab to market” description implies a conversion of
ideas into products and services. Also,
it’s easy to expand this definition to be more precise about the starting and
ending points of the technology commercialization process. For instance, a more
realistic starting point sees technology commercialization commencing at the
very moment of ideation versus some laboratory workbench…
and ending at that point when a venture actually creates real wealth.
Personal
experience is speaking now. I’ve been fortunate to play a small role in the
creation of two disciplines.
The first was a very minor role in the 1960’s and 1970’s when huge
research and teaching efforts on multinational enterprise at Harvard Business
School (and eventually elsewhere) led to the legitimization of international
business as a core business discipline, one that became part and parcel of every
business curriculum. The second occurred at Babson College in the 1970’s and
early 1980’s where my efforts as Department Chair, Planning Director, and the
first Director of the Entrepreneurship Program contributed to the eventual
acceptance of entrepreneurship as an accepted discipline…first at Babson and
then elsewhere.
I
should note that it took about 15 years for entrepreneurship to be fully
accepted as a valid discipline, one with a concrete body of knowledge that had
hard value for practitioners. Acceptance was rarely easy, especially in the
early years, and resistance came not only from academicians, but also from
corporate boardrooms and government offices.
Even successful entrepreneurs rejected the notion that their success was
explained as something more than a biological trait. Yet the evidence shows that entrepreneurship is a learnable process where the odds of success are improved through knowledge discovery. Now new concepts, tools, organizational entities, and methods must be innovated for technology commercialization. Sten Thore and others at IC2 have opened the doors for us. We only need the courage to pass through to a new knowledge arena. Let your journey begin with this fine book." Prospectus: The
theme of TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZATION is the evaluation and prioritization of
R&D projects, paying regard to, if need be, to the environmental
consequences of those projects.
A "project" may be the development and commercialization of a
product, a manufacturing process, or a complex of products and processes
packaged and marketed as a single unit. The purpose of the evaluation is to
gauge the commercialization potential of the project, that is, moving it from
the laboratory to the market. Many parties may have a stake in such an
evaluation, including private corporations, venture capitalists, business
incubators, the stock market, government development banks, and public bodies
charged with protecting the environment. The emerging academic study of
technology commercialization lies at the point of intersection of a number of
well-established disciplines such as marketing, management, finance, economics,
technology engineering and environmental sciences.
TECHNOLOGY COMMERCIALIZATION reaches out to
commercialization managers, MBA students and to specialists. Two tutorials and
nine extensive Editorial Introductions provide background textbook material on
the commercialization process. Ten research papers discuss analytical techniques
such as Multi-Criteria Analysis and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as tools of
evaluation and prioritization. DEA is a fairly recent mathematical technique for
the ranking of entities that are characterized by an entire vector of
performance indicators (rather than a single figure of merit).
The performance indicators include standard metrics such as the expected
sales and profit stream of each R&D project, but may also include
attitudinal or social factors (such as the scores of academic research papers
provided by experts sounded out by the Association of Dutch Universities, or the
number of local jobs expected to be created by a particular NASA aeronautics
projects). They may
also include environmental harms (negative indicators) such as the volume of
greenhouse gases generated by a product over its lifetime. The diversity of
these applications prompts the authors of the research papers to expand and
enrich the established DEA procedures in various directions.
- - At the end of the book, there is an appendix on the mathematics of
DEA, suitable for the beginner, and listings of computer software. Programmatic statement: "Technology commercialization is still a discipline in search of itself. The idea and the vision that motivates the present work is that perhaps - - just perhaps - - a simple mathematical programming model called DEA can be harnessed to provide the mathematical rigor that will enable the discipline of technology commercialization to get off the ground… We came to see the DEA model as a general mathematical principle for the ranking and selection of uncertain projects. We were able to model the selection of research projects by government development banks, by venture capitalists, and even by academic research institutions. We have accounted for the pricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) on the stock market. We spent considerable efforts on the evaluation and ranking of projects with possible harmful ecological side effects. ” Cited from the Prologue to the book. Contents:
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