On the development of a technology intelligence tool for identifying technology opportunity

Technology intelligence tools have come to be regarded as vital components in planning for technology development and formulating technology strategies. However, most such tools currently focus on providing graphical frameworks and databases to support the process of technology analysis. Techpioneer, the proposed tool in this paper, aims to offer decisive information in order to identify technology opportunities. To this end, the system uses textual information from technological document databases and applies morphology analysis to derive promising alternatives and conjoint analysis to evaluate their priority. In addition, the method used in developing a technology dictionary is presented, employing clustering and network analysis. This system also has the ability to communicate with experts in order to estimate the value of existing patents, which is inevitable for the priority-setting of alternatives, construct a morphological matrix and so on. This paper presents the system architecture and functions of this tool and moreover, illustrates the prototype implementation and case study of the same. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.