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Explaining the Future
EXPLAINING THE
FUTURE
How to Research, Analyze, and Report
on Emerging Technologies
sunny bains
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
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© Sunny Bains 2019
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948523
ISBN 978–0–19–882282–0
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198822820.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For Stuart and CJ
PREFACE
W
ill this new technology solve the problem its inventors claim it
will? Is it likely to succeed for any application at all? What is
the right technical solution for a particular problem? Can we
narrow down the options before we spend a lot of money on develop-
ment? How do we persuade our colleagues, investors, clients, or readers of
our technical reasoning?
Whether you’re a researcher, a consultant, a venture capitalist, or a
CTO, you will need to be able to answer these questions systematically
and with clarity. Most people learn these skills through years of experi-
ence. However, they are so basic to a high-level technical career that they
should be made explicit and learned up front, making the whole learning
process more efficient.
This book will provide you with the tools you need to think through
how to match new (and old) technologies, materials, and processes with
applications. Specifically, the first chapter covers the questions you need
to answer, while the second looks at how to structure your research to
answer them and points you to different resources that you might not
have thought to use. Chapter 3 discusses how to decide whose opinions
you should trust, whether in writing or in person, and whose you should
treat with caution.
In Chapter 4, we switch gear and focus on technical analysis, bringing
together all the information you have gathered into something meaning-
ful. To help you visualize what needs to be done here, this section includes
several canvases that can be blown up and used to structure your material.
These will help you identify opportunities and difficulties, eliminate dead
ends, and recognize where pieces of the puzzle are missing and you have
to do more research.
The final three chapters will help you think about how to communicate
your conclusions. Chapter 5 starts with the most important part of the
communication process—the audience—and how it dictates everything
Preface | vii
from how you set the context for your report, to the kind of jargon you
use, to the depth of explanation you go to. In Chapter 6, the critical basic
steps of a technical argument are covered, along with clear, pragmatic
explanations of how they must be ordered in order to bring your audience
along with you.
Chapter 7 essentially covers how to be believed. It teaches you how to
second-guess your audience’s prejudices, how to avoid coming across as a
salesperson, and how important it is to be honest about issues that go
against your argument so that your readers will learn to trust you. It also
provides advice on how to guide your audience through difficult material
by using good writing and clear signposts.
Finally, the book concludes with a case study showing worked examples
of how all these techniques can be used in practice.
What you do with these skills is up to you. You might use them to
ensure that you position your work to be ripe for funding opportunities,
or to figure out who your potential customers are. Alternatively, you
might use them to determine whether the claims made for a particular
technology are valid: is it valuable, or is it vaporware? This book will teach
you how to find the right information, ask the right questions, and inter-
pret what you find without being swayed by hyperbole and PR.
Whatever your end goal, this book will help you to make your case in clear,
logical reports that are spoken and written at the right level for your audience.
Audience
The book is written for people with some kind of technical (engineering
or science) background. It’s ideal for students, from motivated under-
graduates to masters and doctoral candidates, in that it will help give you
a framework for thinking about your subject, as well as tools for research,
analysis, and technical communication. For graduates taking their first
steps into consultancy, start-ups, or tech-sector investing, the book high-
lights the real-world issues that determine success in technology but are
often neglected at university, as well as introducing you to some important
audiences you will have to persuade in order to achieve success. Finally,
the book will suit mid-career scientists and engineers moving from the
lab to technical management and other careers that demand they be more
strategic in their thinking.
viii | Preface
For more information
Once you’ve finished reading, you can get more resources via our website.
These include summary videos highlighting key concepts; downloadable
versions of the canvases used in the book; instructions, templates and
check sheets for writing different kinds of documents and presentations;
and more. Go to http://explaining-the-future.org and get full access by
logging in as reader and using the password ETFbook1.
Preface | ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
here are many people whom I’d like to thank and who, one way or
another, made this book possible. First and foremost, I’d like to
thank all those I’ve taught – whether in industry, undergraduate
students, or postgraduates, in the US or the UK – who have helped me
hone my teaching of this subject over the last 20 years. This book is my
answer to the many requests I’ve had for better, more-comprehensive
notes: I hope it suffices! Among the several thousand I’ve worked with, I’d
particularly like to thank the hundreds of teaching assistants I’ve trained,
and who have then helped me to help others. The hours we spent together
developing your skills have been some of the most rewarding and productive
of my working life (though not the easiest!), and the feedback and encour-
agement you’ve given me as you’ve seen the benefits in your own careers
has kept me going.
Another group of people to whom I owe a debt are those who have
written for me over the years and whose snippets of raw text I’ve used as
examples of good and bad practice. I’ve not named these contributors
because the text is old, unedited, and I didn’t want to embarrass them by
drawing attention to their habits (even if they were good!), but I think of
them every time I present these examples to students.
There are some specific people I’d like to thank. First, for more than a
decade, Rashik Parmar of IBM has reminded me – even when it felt like
no one else cared – that it is not just a luxury, but a priority for engineers
to communicate. Gary Lye, Chika Nweke (a former teaching assistant as
well as a valued colleague!) and all the staff in the UCL Department of
Biochemical Engineering also have my deepest gratitude for creating a
supportive work environment that allowed me to focus on getting this
book finished.
I’m also grateful to those who specifically helped me with Explaining
the Future. Colin Hayhurst (Innovations Partnership Fellow at the
University of Sussex) and Maurice Granger (chemical engineer and
Acknowle dgments | xi
former teaching fellow at UCL) both helped by reading and giving really
helpful feedback on drafts of the early chapters. Rose Gotto was extremely
encouraging and helped proof my book proposal for Oxford University
Press.
Which brings me on to Sonke Adlung who commissioned Explaining
the Future, Harriet Konishi, Elizabeth Farrell, and the rest of the team at
OUP. You made the editing of this book simple, straightforward and rela-
tively stress free (I wish the writing process had been as smooth). I would
recommend working with you to anyone. Thanks also to the production
team led by Lydia Shinoj.
I’d finally like to thank all my family for their help and support. One of
my brothers, Jon Bains, suggested that I develop canvases for the analytical
steps and helped me think them through. His time and thought were par-
ticularly invaluable. I also want to mention my nearest and dearest who
had the job of keeping me going during the day-to-day process of writing,
editing, and proofing the book while trying to get on with work and life.
You made this book possible.
xii | Acknowle dgments

CONTENTS
1. Key Questions 1
2. Finding Answers 20
3. Perspectives and Agendas 41
4. Analyze 51
Case Study Part I: Research and Analysis 85
5. Audience and Explanation 112
6. Technical Argument and Structure 132
7. Credibility 153
Case Study Part II: Report 180
Epilogue 188
References 191
Index 193
Contents | xiii
CHAPTER 1
Key Questions
H eadlines about research generally have the same form:
• “Breakthrough in Nanotechnology Will Enable Low-Power Circuits”

• “New Medicine May Cure Cancer”
• “Algorithm Designed by Evolution Will Make Our Computers More Secure”
These headlines intrinsically encode society’s value system when it comes

to new technology: either today or sometime in the future, whatever it is
it, must prove useful.
Of course, there is blue-sky research and/or pure science, but funding for
these is relatively scarce. In the UK, for instance, two-thirds of R & D is funded
by businesses rather than by the government,1 and, even in universities and
government labs, much of the work done is applied science and engineering.
This means there are two fundamental questions in technology: “What
can this do?” and “What can do this?”. The first implies that you have a
technology in mind and want to know how to apply it. The second implies
you’re trying to build something (you have an application), have a problem
1 See Office of National Statistics, Statistical Bulletin: Gross Domestic Expenditure

on Research and Development, UK: 2014 (2016), http://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/
governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/researchanddevelopmentexpenditure/bulletins/
ukgrossdomesticexpenditureonresearchanddevelopment/2014, accessed July 6, 2018.
Explaining the Future: How to Research, Analyze, and Report on Emerging Technologies. Sunny Bains
© Sunny Bains 2019. Published in 2019 by Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198822820.001.0001
Key Question s | 1
to solve, and are trying to find the right technology to achieve that.
These two questions define two different perspectives, both of which are
important and both of which we’ll consider in the upcoming chapters.
We’ll start by considering the case of one specific technology and what
it can do.
Question 1: What’s so special about

this technology?
Some person, laboratory, or company has developed a new process,
widget, algorithm, or material and is making great claims about its poten-
tial to change the world. Your job is to evaluate these claims, which means
being skeptical. What is different about this approach compared to all the
others out there (in commercial terms, what is its unique selling point?)?
What can it do? What does it make possible?
Let’s make this more concrete with an example. A company has devel-
oped a program that turns your webcam into an eye tracker that can figure
out what you’re looking at on the screen and the emotion you’re displaying
while looking in a particular direction. What’s so special about that? There
could be all sorts of answers to this question. Maybe it can be used to cata-
log your likes and dislikes for advertising purposes. Maybe it can help
diagnose mental illness. Maybe it can add a new dimension to gaming.
Whatever it is, the answer will be some kind of claim that you can then take
time to research and verify. Most claims fall into one of three categories.
The most obvious, simplest assertion inventors might make is that their
invention’s performance is better than the competition in some way: the
algorithm is better than other similar systems that already exist on the
market because it’s faster, less processer intensive, or more accurate, or it
works with less-controlled input. This claim may be strong or weak depend-
ing on whether it is unlimited or comes with a lot of caveats. Saying an eye
tracker is the fastest ever made is very different than saying it’s the fastest
of its kind, because the latter requires that you read the small print to see
what “kind” that is.
Alternatively, the company might say that the new program represents
an integrated solution created using existing but state-of-the-art tech-
nologies to address a specific new application: that of finding out how people
react emotionally to advertisements. None of the individual elements may
be exceptional in themselves but together they form a system that is better
2 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

suited to this task than anything else ever built. Alternatively, it may simply
be the first attempt to address this exact application at all. Either way, this
claim is only strong if the application is really interesting. It also begs the
question, is it better suited to the task than other systems that could be built?
Just because something is the first of its kind doesn’t mean it’s the best.
The third claim, which is generally only made if a technology is really
new and different, is that it is potentially disruptive of some technology
space. This wouldn’t necessarily apply to our eye tracker but might to a
new material with some unique properties, for instance. Very-high-
temperature superconductors (which allow electricity to flow with almost
no resistance) would fall into this category. They could allow the creation
of all kinds of devices that would have been impossible to build up to now
and would be qualitatively different than those we use today.
A less dramatic, but more common, claim is that a new process or sys-
tem is an enabling technology: that is, it makes possible further develop-
ment in a related field. For instance, if you were able to produce a more
efficient, scalable purification process, you might enable the manufacture
of new drugs that would otherwise still contain toxic byproducts. Enabling
technologies are extremely important but, like any other, they have to be
evaluated.
Finally, there are new approaches to technical fields that have the poten-
tial to completely reframe how we think about its development. In artifi-
cial intelligence, for instance, the idea of bottom-up learning based on
experience (making sense of information coming directly from sensors)
was for decades seen as being much less important than knowledge-based
expert systems programmed by humans. Over the last ten to fifteen years,
this has changed, and what we now call “deep learning” has provided us
with a completely new way of looking at the subject. (We’ll be discussing
deep learning a lot more in the case study.) Systematization of a field can
often have this effect (think of the periodic table), as can computer design
tools that allow us to create circuits, lenses, mechanical parts, and chem-
icals, without the skill and number crunching that was previously required.
If you are an inventor, finding out what claim(s) you can legitimately
make for a new technology can be critical for getting funding, getting a
job, or getting publicity. However, if your job is to evaluate the potential of
research, identifying whether a claim is well founded is just the first step.
The next step is to assess whether it is relevant to the task in hand: the
application.
Key Question s | 3
Question 2: What problem are you
trying to solve?
Often, with the claims we’ve discussed, there is an application implied: an
area where there is an existing problem that could be solved with the new
technology. For instance, if you take a performance claim, some company
might say they’ve developed the most fuel-efficient engine yet and imply
that it will make cars of the future more eco-friendly.
Validating this claim doesn’t involve redoing the efficiency measure-
ments. Although there are cases of scientific fraud that would make this
necessary, it’s not usually an issue. The problem is that this one measure of
performance does not tell you everything you need to know about whether
a development is likely to have a positive impact.
For instance, what if the high-efficiency performance only occurs for
steady highway driving, and the engine is actually less efficient than exist-
ing cars in the city? What if the engine requires new fuel additives, isn’t
compatible with current car design practices, or emits particularly toxic
pollutants? What if the engine design requires a lot of a very expensive
and/or scarce mineral?
These are not rhetorical questions: just because the engine has some
limitations or disadvantages doesn’t mean that it is useless. There may be
applications where it’s by far the best option. But, without understanding
the application requirements, there’s no way to answer these questions
meaningfully.
Another example to consider is as follows: a group is claiming that
they’ve created a computer using microelectromechanical logic gates.
This kind of logic gate is much less efficient than that used in standard
electronics: it is slower and heavier and takes up a lot more space on a
chip. Oh, and it’s much more expensive. Useless, right? Perhaps not, if
you’re trying to build some kind of failsafe device for a nuclear power sta-
tion. Conventional electronics can be very easily (falsely) switched when
exposed to radiation, and this makes them unreliable in any sort of disas-
ter. Mechanical switches, thanks to the fact that they’re less efficient
(require a lot more energy to switch) are more robust and therefore better
for this kind of backup system.
Bugs really can be features, and features really can be bugs. You only
know for sure if you get into the detail.

Sometimes the problem is that the applications of a piece of research
are many and varied (a good problem to have if you are looking for work
with impact). In this case, the solution is to choose an example application
(or a few) to work through that will help you make a case for the likeli-
hood of success. When you get to the reporting stage, these examples will
also make it much easier for you to persuade others of the value of the
new technology.
Technical requirements
We usually start with the technical requirements because, if these can’t be
met, the rest don’t matter very much. To get to grips with these, you need
to get to know the subject by exploring and interrogating various sources
and understanding their perspectives. We’ll get to these later. For now
we’ll focus on the questions to ask.
A technical requirement can be almost anything that—if the new tech-
nology doesn’t meet it—could prevent it from working, or working well
enough to be at all useful. One set of requirements would come from
thinking of the technology as a process with inputs and outputs: so, the
webcam algorithm we discussed earlier takes in image data and produces
an output that describes both where on the screen the user was looking
and what their emotional state was. The purification system takes in a
drug in a given form with a given proportion of impurities and then
pushes it out with those impurities reduced. Understanding what some
system needs to ingest and what it needs to spit out is critical to working
out whether it can do the job.
Another set of technical requirements relate to performance: how
quickly, efficiently, quietly, or accurately the process needs to be carried
out in order for a solution to be acceptable. The number of performance
measures that can be applied are as varied as the number of applications
served and the number of fields from which the technologies derive.
Many require deep subject knowledge to understand exactly why they are
important or even what they mean. Fortunately, that’s what experts are for
(we’ll discuss them at length in Chapter 2).
Physical constraints such as size, weight, and power (aka SWaP) can
be important in many applications. Whether or not a technology is viable
may depend on its size, its shape, its weight, its strength, or the number of
degrees of freedom in which it can move, and—although this may seem
Key Question s | 5
obvious—these everyday concepts mask a multitude of much more
technical ideas. Strength doesn’t mean anything per se: it’s tensile strength,
elasticity, hardness, and so on that matters. Which, precisely, are important
for a given application, and which are not, are what you have to determine
in your research.
Yet another issue to consider is what operating conditions a piece of
technology will have to endure, and its related working lifetime. If a cir-
cuit board needs to be kept below room temperature to operate, then
you’re unlikely to be able to install it inside a PC. If a building material
dissolves in acid rain, then—whatever other great properties it has—
you’re not going to want to use it in your roof tiles.
That these requirements exist may seem obvious and, when you’re in
the thick of trying to design a system, you’ll be acutely aware of what each
component or subsystem needs to do and/or withstand in order to fulfill
its role. Engineers won’t choose products or use processes that don’t meet
their exacting specifications when they are putting their own projects
together.
However, this doesn’t help us when we’re trying to evaluate technolo-
gies that don’t exist on the market yet. Essentially, we have to s econd-guess
what the requirements will be. Where one product is straightforwardly
just a replacement for another, it’s easy: the requirements already exist.
But some requirements are not defined explicitly. Doesn’t dissolve in the
rain is a key property of many building materials: so much so that we
might not have thought to write it down. However, the creators of an
advanced composite with many sophisticated properties might have over-
looked this issue if they were focused on indoor applications. As the one
evaluating whether the material could be useful for construction, it would
be up to you to make sure that waterproof was on your list.
Identifying the technical requirements for applications that don’t even
exist yet is even more difficult. It is possible to do this, however, as long as
you are willing to deal with some level of uncertainty. By making educated
guesses (or asking others to) about how the new application is likely to
work, drawing parallels with similar existing applications, and taking sub-
sets of their requirements that seem relevant and then thinking through
their potential points of failure, you can come up with a workable specifi-
cation. This won’t be definitive, but what it will do is give you some idea of
what is critical for success.

Ethical and legal requirements
Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Any discussion of what will make
an application work technically should be followed (if not preceded!) by a
discussion of how it will work ethically and/or legally. Take the eye tracker
that detects our emotions, again. This was a real project intended to help
online platforms give useful feedback to their advertisers. The question
for me would be, who would want this used on them? It’s bad enough
knowing that free services have access to all the data we give them delib-
erately, but think of all the data we could inadvertently be giving away if
they had access to our webcams, from our taste in sexual partners to our
adherence to certain political philosophies.
Of course, you can think about ways to mitigate this: it’s off by default,
and you have to turn it on, for instance, and maybe people are given some
kind of inducement to use it. But what if this makes the whole enterprise
nonviable?
Likewise, what if you produce a purification system that produces
sludge so toxic that there is no way to dispose of it legally? Or, maybe you
can in some places, but at great risk to those living nearby.
Ethical considerations cover a huge range of different issues. Privacy is
an important one, because it is covered by legislation. Just because you
are in a position to gather data does not mean you are allowed to store
it, process it, and use it for your own ends. People (in some parts of the
world) have the right to know what information is being held about
them so that, if necessary, they can challenge it, correct it, or delete it.
A technology aimed at some future application that doesn’t take this into
account is—at the very least—likely to encounter some surprises in its
development.
There is also a lot of law around health and safety, and this can apply to
every stage of a project. For example, in most of the industrialized world,
there are laws requiring your place of work to take appropriate measures
to protect you from getting work-related repetitive strain injury (which is
often—but not exclusively—related to typing). In addition, there are other
laws related to breathing in fumes or working too long at the factory where
components are made, lifting boxes of parts onto trucks, developing eye
strain where the components are being assembled, and even using the
product once it’s been sold. If the application is to succeed, its component
technologies will have to be fabricated in accordance with these rules.
Key Question s | 7
A related concept here is exploitation. If an application requires a lot of
labor but is not expected to bring in much money, then the temptation
may be to pay the workers as little as they will accept to get the job done.
In some cases, this may be so little that either they cannot afford a reason-
able standard of living or they cannot afford to live without working an
unreasonable number of hours. Both of these are unethical, and, in some
countries, they are also illegal.
Environmental concerns are also important to consider. There are obvi-
ous issues, like the potential toxic sludge of our purification process, but
also many others that are more subtle. Life-cycle analysis is a tool that con-
siders the impact of a product (or potential product), from the mining and
shipping of the raw materials, to the energy used and pollution created
during production, to the disposal of the final artifact once it has broken or
become obsolete. For some industries, especially those related to nuclear
or fossil-fuel-based energy, environmental concerns—and the laws put in
place to address them—have had a huge impact on long-term viability.
There are fewer legal sanctions related to the impact on society of new
technologies. This is partly because they can be difficult to prove, partly
because society can be harmed without individuals feeling they’re being
harmed, and partly because some of the responsibility for harm has to be
taken by individuals themselves. Arguments are made about supermar-
kets causing us to waste food, video games causing us to waste time or
making us violent, and bad architecture preventing us from knowing our
neighbors. In the short term, such arguments may not matter very much
to investors. In the long term, doing the right thing often pays off.
Unethical behavior is not always punished, but both the law and political
scrutiny are having an increasing effect on how businesses run. In the UK,
for instance, corruption (aka bribery) has been illegal for some time.
Businesses not only have to behave ethically and conform to the law them-
selves but are expected to make sure all the companies in their supply chain
are doing the same. The most famous examples of such issues in recent years
have been related to the use of conflict minerals used in the electronics
industry (mined by people enslaved by Congolese militias) and the issues
surrounding the working conditions of Foxconn employees making iPhones
for Apple. In the former case, specific legislation was passed in the US requir-
ing the tracking of materials from their origin to make sure that conflict
minerals did not end up in consumer products. In the latter case, Apple was
forced to at least pay lip service to exhibiting better corporate responsibility.

Another critical area to consider is the regulatory framework for the
application area and geographical market you are planning to go into. If
you are working on medical devices, for instance, it can take years of clin-
ical trials in the lab, in animals, and in people to get permission to sell
your product. Even then, you will likely be limited in what you can sell
your product for. For example, even if your new insulin injector turns out
to be useful for other drugs, if your trials only tested it with insulin, then
it is quite likely that you will have to do a lot more testing before you are
allowed to address your potential wider market.
This points to a problem that many people have in analyzing and posi-
tioning technologies: they think too narrowly about what the particular
tech in question does, can do, and will have to compete with. We’ll come
back to that again later.
Related to regulatory frameworks are issues to do with security and
export control. Often, these issues have to do with what are known as dual-
use technologies (those that can be used both for conventional commercial
purposes and for weapons, surveillance, or secure communication). For
instance, there was an infamous case where the Apple G4 personal computer
(released in 1999) was briefly classed as a supercomputer and therefore could
not be exported to some countries that the US government deemed
unfriendly (what Apple lost in sales, they seemed to more than make up in
good publicity!) Another example from the 1990s was the case of three lines
of Perl code (related to cryptography) classified by ITAR (International
Traffic in Arms Regulations) as munitions . . . and then printed on T-shirts.
Dual-use technologies can be anything from centrifuges, chemicals,
minerals, pipes, computers, code, machines that can be used to build
other machines, and so on—almost anything. So, before you decide that
your tech has a perfect application in another country, you need to be
clear that you will legally be able to address that market.
Do all these issues matter for the application(s) that you care about?
Unlikely. Do any of them matter? It would be surprising if there were not
one issue among all these that could represent an important obstacle to
progress if it were not specifically addressed.
Commercial requirements
If you thought that we missed some important issues in the technical sec-
tion, there’s a reason for that. Some important requirements look technical
but are, in fact, commercial.
Key Question s | 9
Compatibility is a good example of this. An application might be
technically possible without being compatible with anything (a lot of
prototypes are like this). However, selling a new technology often involves
it being able to work—at least in the short term—with equipment that
people already have. In fact, this factor alone could help a technology beat
its much-better-performing rival. What compatibility means depends on
the context: it could mean making sure your widget has the right connectors,
your process uses the right chemicals, or your data is in the right format.
It doesn’t really matter as long as you know in advance what’s required and
you understand that you may have to address your market segment by
segment if the compatibility issues are different for each one.
There is a whole constellation of requirements that are connected with
the issue of cost. If the technology is going to be used as part of a product
or service that is going to have to meet a certain price point when it sold
(whether that’s to consumers or business), this can affect everything from
manufacturability (how easy and cheap it is to make), to the materials
used, to overheads like server costs for cloud-based services connected to
products, to any labor involved, and so on. All of these issues are com-
pletely dependent on the application, and all of them have a direct impact
on the type of technology that can succeed.
And then there are the users and what they want and need. So many
would-be products start as a great idea in somebody’s head—and end up
in bankruptcy—because the great idea doesn’t appeal to or solve the prob-
lem of those who are expected to pay for it. Whole books are written on
the subject of business models and product design, both of which are far
beyond the scope of this one. But, at the very least, a reality check is war-
ranted. That involves going out and talking to people. We’ll talk about how
to do that in the Chapter 2.
Potential obstacles
With dozens of potential requirements, it may sound extremely time-
consuming to figure out whether a new technology will be derailed by one
of them or not. This might be fine for an investor or CTO, but not for a
researcher or student.
However, just a little research can take you a long way. Let’s say you’ve
been tasked to find out (quickly!) whether a new robotic technology—
developed for use in car manufacturing plants—could also be used as
robotic toys, as the company claims. Part of the work is done for you

because you know the technology is already in use in industry, so you can
figure out what it can successfully do by looking at that example. Now that
you understand what it does, do you really believe that it will work in
toys? A five-minute discussion with a toy manufacturer will probably lead
you to understand that there are two things that matter in that business:
safety (legal/ethical requirement) and cost (commercial requirement).
If you know enough about your application, you’ll see immediately the
kinds of questions you need to ask. Will the behavior of the robot be as
predictable in the chaotic environment of a home filled with children and
pets as it is in a factory? If the robot malfunctions, is it strong enough to
hurt anyone? How much does the processor (computer) cost that controls
the robot? What about the actuators that make it move?
Where you do find problems, it may or may not be possible to work
around them. It could be that an application is not feasible right now because
it cannot support the cost of the computing power it needs. By waiting a
couple of years for technology to naturally evolve and reduce in price, that
barrier may disappear. On the other side, there could be an intrinsic tech-
nical problem that requires a major research push to fix: these issues will be
important to keep track of as you do your research and analysis.
If you don’t know enough about your application, and you don’t ask the
right questions, you may be so blown away by the company’s demo that
you forget to see whether the technology is really fit for the new purpose.
No problem for the solution? Be creative . . .

Sometimes a technology is just cool. It isn’t particularly designed to do
anything, but it seems to have some features that make it special. It’s easy
to get excited about such technologies and then quickly lose interest due
to a lack of any obvious application.
There are two things to do when this happens. The first is to try to look
for the nonobvious application. You do this by going up the layers of
abstraction. What’s special about this material? It’s expensive but really
strong. Where does strength matter but not cost? Could the material be
used to trade off strength for quantity (less material for the same strength?).
Think of as many different scenarios as possible in which the particular
features of the tech can be exploited.
Sometimes this will get you to applications, and sometimes to a set of
higher-level features, that is, features that people outside your immediate
technical area can understand without knowing too much about the
Key Question s | 11
detail. Getting a really good feature set will allow you talk to a diverse col-
lection of people about potential applications: people from different
disciplines, those at different stages in their careers, and so on. If you have
a solution in search of a problem, you need to find the problem, and
brainstorming with others is the quickest way to do this. (There’s a canvas
to help you do this in Chapter 4.)
However, it’s important that you recognize that not all technologies do
have applications, and that not all applications are close to being marketable.
Question 3: What is the effect of time?

Timing is everything. It’s not enough to have the right technology for the
right application; everything has to match up on cue. This is especially
true when a good idea will need quite a bit of development before it
becomes an actual product. There are two main reasons for this, progress
and competition, but the latter is going to get its own section, so we’ll
leave that for now.
Most people have heard of Moore’s law. It’s expressed in a lot of different
ways, but essentially it means that the processing power on a chip doubles
every two years. The law was very important in the semiconductor and
chip-design industry because it set a benchmark for what you would
expect the computing world to look like over a period of time. Why is this
useful? Imagine you are developing some kind of optical memory device
and you think you will be able to store ten times more data in it that than
you currently can in a conventional memory stick. It will take you three
years to get it on the market. Is it likely to succeed?
If ten times more data represents the limits of the technology, then the
answer is almost certainly no way. By the time the devices came out, the
advantage would be only 2–3 times the density. In six or seven years, con-
ventional technology will have caught up, and in eight it will have sur-
passed the new optical memory. Not a good investment.
But if the tenfold advantage in data density is not the best the technol-
ogy can do, but rather just the starting point, then that’s a different story.
If you’re taking it seriously, you might make predictions about how your
new technology will progress and how the conventional technology
will progress, and then plot those on a graph. If the technology can go
twenty years without being surpassed, you’re probably in good shape.
Ideally, the lines will never cross, because the new technology is always

improving faster than the old. If you can’t predict how either technology
will evolve—not even to the level of an educated guess—that’s an important
piece of information too. Whatever you know (or don’t know) can be
incorporated into your thinking.
This analysis works with like-with-like replacements for existing prod-
ucts (where a new technology seems to perform better than an old one).
It’s not quite so simple if the market for a product does not exist. But the
principle stands: it’s not enough to talk about something that may be bet-
ter than what we have today. As time passes, technology evolves, and an
analysis that doesn’t take this on board will have no credibility.
Incidentally, it’s important to recognize that time is critical in lots of
other ways too: if the market’s not ready for a new product, it doesn’t matter
how great or well-adapted it is. For engineers, however, the critical ques-
tion is whether you are always going to be looking at the tail lights of the
technology in front. If you’re already in the market, being worse than your
competitors is survivable because people are inherently resistant to change,
and first-mover advantage is real. For a newcomer to succeed, however,
requires an immediate and impressive improvement on the status quo.
Limits
It may sound obvious, but growth cannot continue forever. Even Moore’s
law (the seemingly unending exponential increase in computer power) is
grinding to a halt, thanks to a combination of technical and commercial
limits. On the one hand, the challenges of manufacturing technology are
on the nano- rather than the micro-scale. Think about the relationship
between circuit density and yield. If you can reliably manufacture with, say,
with a few circuits per billion on a chip being faulty, then the number of
faults on a chip of a given size will go up with density. If you need a perfect
chip, that means you are having to throw away twice as many defective
chips for twice the density of circuits. You can get around this either by
improving your process to minimize the percentage of faults per circuit or
by introducing redundant circuitry (which duplicates the function of other
circuit elements) so that if something is broken, you can work around it.
That redundancy cuts the number of unique elements you can put in your
chip and, likely, the benefit of having a higher density in the first place.
The commercial pressures are just as real. Most people (most applica-
tions) don’t need more processing power, so if you build the equipment to
make the latest chips, you may not be selling to a very big market. Since the
Key Question s | 13
latest fabrication technology requires a lot of investment by manufacturers,
the chips they produce will be more expensive. This can quash demand.
In the case of chip manufacturing, the big issue that engineers had seen
coming for a long time was that of the end of the classical semiconductor.
Semiconductors work because one material is doped with another. For
every so many thousand or million atoms of one type, there will be one of
another, the dopant, that changes the semiconductor’s properties. While
this is fine when there are millions or billions of atoms in a circuit, the
system breaks down as the feature sizes get smaller. Because the doping can
only be controlled statistically (i.e. you know that roughly 1/1000 atoms is
going to be a dopant, but you don’t know exactly where that dopant will
end up) there could be circuit elements or areas where the dopant doesn’t
make it in at all, resulting in electrical properties that are not as expected.
As it happens, electronic engineers have found ways to work through
and get around this limit by being creative, and commercial and other
factors have ended up being far more important than physics. However,
I would argue that paying attention to technical limits, where they exist,
can help us to make better predictions about how technologies will evolve,
and such an approach has the advantage of being easier to predict than the
vagaries of supply and demand in an evolving marketplace.
Of course, every industry—indeed, every technology—is different.
There may be no equivalent of Moore’s law for the case you are looking at,
and no obvious point at which progress is likely to break down. This is
where you have to get creative, looking at the track records of technolo-
gies that have features similar to those of the new one. There’s no guaran-
tee that the analogy will hold up over time, but this kind of educated guess
will generally prove much more productive than none at all.
Money, momentum, and market

Often, time pressure comes not from technological limitations or competi-
tion but from the evolution of the industrial, social, economic, and even pol-
itical climate. This is most obvious in research and in investment funding,
both of which are often driven by fashion. In investment, this can cause a
bubble, when there is more money to invest than there are genuinely good
ideas to invest in. Waiting to push out an idea in an area that’s become trendy,
perhaps because it’s not 100 percent thought through, might cause you to
“miss the boat.” Once people start to lose money through all the bad ideas
they funded, it can become difficult to find investment for even the best ideas.

Research funding can be much the same: an area may become “hot” for
a while because it is seen to have some strategic value or is championed by
someone in government but then disappear without a trace five years
later. Researchers have learned to be opportunistic about this: they will
bend their work to fit an in-vogue application so that they can get money
to support their teams. They know that it’s critical to jump on the band-
wagon when it starts rolling, ready or not.
Another issue related to timing is more structural. Industries go
through cycles, and launching a new—but not disruptive—technology
into the market is much less likely to be successful in one of the later
stages. At the beginning (the innovation stage), everything is new and
fresh and has potential, and so-called first-mover advantage can be
knocked out by better technology, implementation, or marketing. As the
technology expands, it’s all about performance and features: who can
make the best product, offer new features, or make things run faster. As
the market reaches its peak, success becomes less about high performance
and dramatic changes and more about low cost and incremental improve-
ment. The next stage is consolidation, using fewer resources to satisfy
those same users, often through the merging of companies.
Finally, there are other factors that appear to have almost nothing to do
with technology but can make a huge difference to the climate in which
new products are released. Developments in unmanned aerial vehicles
(aka UAVs, aka drones) would not be nearly so advanced were it not for
wars and political unrest. Revolutionary embryonic stem cell research
and development only became possible because recent legislation in some
countries allows it. Genetically modified food is not as profitable in
Europe as it is in the US, partly because of legislation and partly because
of a cultural distaste for it. Nuclear energy is being phased out in Germany
because of public opinion and political action to ban it as a result of the
Fukushima disaster in Japan.
Getting started
Finally, it is important to remember that you cannot compare technolo-
gies that are in the market now with those that require development. Or,
rather, you can, but you must take account of this important difference.
Even if there seem to be few or no obstacles to a new technology entering
the market, getting there takes time. Businesses have to raise money, hire
staff, build infrastructure, and find suppliers. Just because a technology
Key Question s | 15
seems competitive today does not mean it will actually be competitive if it
launches four years from now. This has to be factored in.
It is not impossible to succeed with bad timing. However, with technol-
ogy being such a hit-and-miss business in the first place, good or bad
timing can be a critical issue.
Question 4: What is the competition?

The last major issue to consider is competition, which is a much harder
issue to think through than might be immediately apparent. Theoretically,
competition can be separated into three different types (although, in real-
ity, there can be many nested levels to work through).
The status quo

The most obvious benchmark for comparison is always to look at the sta-
tus quo (how things work now). How is the problem you are trying to
solve with the new technology addressed today? This is easy to research,
verifiable, and generally uncontroversial. However, as we discussed in the
last section, things are not going to stay the same, so judging a technology
that’s currently in the market against something you plan to develop and
introduce in three years’ time is not good enough. You have to assume
that this competitor will be as busy developing their technology as you are
with yours: you need to project their progress into the future too.
Technology in development
Future competitors are more problematic to identify. These are not actually
in the market yet, but someone, somewhere, has high hopes for them. These
are harder to track down because, for instance, most journalists will only
judge a new technology on how it competes with what we use today. What
you want to know is how it will rate against a host of other technologies that
may already be in development for tomorrow. We’ll talk in Chapter 2 about
the kinds of techniques you can use to track down this kind of competition
(and their limits).
Something completely different

It’s unfortunate, but sometimes we get too close to a problem, and too
wedded to a particular solution. Here’s a story (sadly, an urban myth!) that
is a vivid example of the kind of thing I mean.

During the Cold War, when the USA and the USSR were competing for
“firsts” in space (first in orbit, first to the moon, etc.) NASA spent years
and millions developing a pen that could write without using gravity to
get the ink flowing. In the end, they were successful. In the meantime, the
Soviet cosmonauts were happily using pencils.
The story is doubly false (although, on some level, we all seem to want
it to be true). First, pencils are not a good solution: you don’t want bits of
graphite breaking off your pencil and floating around before ending up in
your filtration system or your eye, or jamming up some machinery.
Second, the space pen was actually developed by the Fisher Pen Company,
with no NASA investment at all.
The reason the story is so seductive is because it provides a kind of mis-
direction, or magic trick. We’re all so busy thinking about the problem of
the way pens work, we forget—even if only for an instant—that the point
was not to make a pen but to allow astro-/cosmonauts to write. The simpli-
city of the pencil solution then seems elegant and obvious by comparison.
Disruptive technologies, those that solve old problems in completely
different ways and (generally) using completely different business models,
are difficult to predict, particularly for engineers. As technical people, we
like to focus on the smallest solvable problem and get to grips with that.
Disruptive technologies come out of thinking at a higher level of abstrac-
tion. But there may not be one such level but many.
If we take it at face value, the space pen is trying to solve the problem of
how to write with ink at zero gravity. The pencil solution (even though it
falls down with closer scrutiny!) is clever because it jumps up a level. This
solution embodies the idea that astronauts probably don’t care whether or
not they are writing with ink but just that they are able to write. In other
words, it’s solving a more general problem. You could go up another layer
of abstraction. Does it matter that the writing be kept? If not, maybe one
of those magic slates kids use (where you write with an inert stylus on a
sheet of plastic over wax, and then you erase by pulling up the plastic)
would work. Does it really matter that the thing is written? Maybe voice
recognition could solve the problem, or a keyboard.
The original solution, the space pen, was a solution based on a lot of
assumptions. Those assumptions may be correct. Or they may have been cor-
rect at the time but became less relevant as time has gone on. If you don’t ques-
tion these assumptions, then—in looking for competition—your focus will
be too narrow, and you will miss technologies that solve a broader problem.
Key Question s | 17
Question 5: What are the features of
each competitor?
For every problem, there may be many possible solutions, each of which
has its own advantages and disadvantages. If the application is very nar-
row, some of these solutions could be ruled out very quickly because they
don’t meet the cost, performance, likely time to market, or other require-
ments. But that’s not always the case. Where it’s more finely balanced, the
only way to make sense of how the options compare is to do a kind of
audit, working through as many of the features of the solution as possible
that could work positively or negatively in any given situation.
This is an iterative process. A property that is advertised as a positive
feature for one solution may not be mentioned at all by those in favor of
another. Why? That’s what you need to find out. You also need to deter-
mine which of the features are most important to the different applica-
tions or market segments.
Determining both the various features of the competitors and how they
affect the applications are research-intensive questions (as are most of the
issues discussed in this chapter). Chapter 2 is about finding the answers.

Summary
To determine the success of an emerging technology or application, you
must ask the following questions:
What’s so special about this technology?
• Its performance?
• It provides an integrated solution?
• It’s disruptive?
• It’s enabling?
• It reframes the field?
What problem are you trying to solve?
• Technical requirements?
• Ethical and legal requirements?
• Commercial requirements?
• Potential obstacles?
• Problems finding problems?
What is the effect of time?
• Limits?
• Money, momentum, and market?
• Getting started?
What is the competition?
• The status quo?
• Technology in development?
• Something completely different?
What are the features of each competitor?
Key Question s | 19
CHAPTER 2
Finding Answers
R
esearch is an iterative process. Whether you’re doing a PhD or
researching an investment, there is a process that involves loops,
diversions, and periods of refocusing. Although there’s no one
right way to do this, the following method may help you to get started.
The end of this chapter defines the various different sources of informa-
tion, explains why they are important, and provides some tips on how to
find the most relevant stuff. Even those of you who already have research
careers should hopefully learn a few tricks here.
First, however, let’s start with process.
Getting organized
From a practical point of view, you’re going to be collecting a lot of infor-
mation, and you want to be able to organize, reorganize, and search it
easily. An e-notebook can be ideal for this. For a technical analysis of the
type we’re looking at in this book, it makes sense to start by organizing the
notebook as follows:
• Primary technology: If there is one, this is the technology you’re thinking of
investing in, researching, sponsoring, and so on.
• Application(s): This is the list of potential application areas the primary technol-
ogy might address, or the one application that you’re interested in analyzing.
Explaining the Future: How to Research, Analyze, and Report on Emerging Technologies. Sunny Bains
© Sunny Bains 2019. Published in 2019 by Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198822820.001.0001

• Competition: This is where you go through each of the competitors for
each application.
Within these sections, of course, you’ll make further divisions to cover

different kinds of requirements, features, and so on.
As well as this, you’ll almost certainly need a reference manager to keep
track of the technical papers that you look at as you go through. There are
several good ones out there. Which of these you use may depend on what
your colleagues use, the kind of computer you have, whether you want to
receive paper recommendations, and so on. Make sure to install this near
the beginning of your research (if you don’t have one already), and regu-
larly think about how to organize (and reorganize) your papers. I strongly
recommend that you make sure you have local copies of any papers that
might be relevant. This will allow you to search their full text rather than
just the abstract and keywords.
In the absence of software that neatly combines the key features of ref-
erence manager and notebook in one, it’s important that you think
through how you are going to use the two applications you’ve chosen
together. You might simply make sure that the pages on your notebook
are the same as the folders holding your papers, or you might do some-
thing more complicated. An hour or two at the beginning thinking this
through could save you many hours organizing and reorganizing later or
looking for things that are not where you expect to find them.
Research can suck up your time. To do it well, you have to stay focused
on what you’re trying to achieve. Whenever you sit down at the computer,
therefore, you should be really clear about what specific question you’re
trying to answer. If you find interesting leads that will relate to later stages
of the work, it may be worth following them briefly, but your best bet is to
clip the link/document/whatever into your electronic notebook, file it
under the right section, and then get back to the job at hand.
As well as organizing materials (links, papers, etc.) you will also want to
start noting down keywords. It may also be useful to start building a con-
cept/mind map from the very beginning, adding keywords as you go.
Example work flow

In what follows, I’m going to assume that you have a technology that you
are looking to apply to real-world problems. You have a good idea of what
Finding An swers | 21
the features of the new technology are and so are happy to move straight
to thinking about applications.
This is only intended as a starting point to illustrate how the research
process can work: how you can set out to find answers to your questions.
If the particular starting point (focusing on “What can this do?” rather
than “What can do this?”) doesn’t work for you, Chapter 4 (on analysis)
explains how you can use different focuses (using canvases) to work
through different types of problems.
Which application is the most promising?

You have a specific technology you want to evaluate, so your first job is to
think through potential applications. Realistically, you will start by using
Google and other search engines to find information. There is a huge
amount of good material out there. However, being adept at searching is
important, as is being able to judge the credibility of the material you find.
We’ll discuss this more in Chapter 3.
You should also be asking the people who are developing the technol-
ogy what they think it should be used for. This could include the inventors,
the funders, or the people in the lab working on the system every day.
Everyone wants to believe that what they are doing is useful and will have
put some thought into what their technology can do and why. While talk-
ing to them, ask them what special features the technology has and (if
they have applications in mind) what specific requirements these relate to.
You don’t have to believe what they say (we’ll talk about the agendas of
different groups of people later). You just have to take note.
If you don’t have direct access to people who know the field, even a
little, the next best thing is to look at what they have written on the sub-
ject. If you’re sufficiently technical in the area you’re researching, you
can go straight to the technical literature published in journals or the
proceedings of conferences. Even if you’re not expert in the area, read-
ing the introductions and conclusions of these papers should give you
some idea of what applications people think their technology will/should
be applied to.
At this stage of the research, you shouldn’t restrict yourself to any spe-
cific project (the approach of one particular group or company). Chances
are, there are several, or many teams working on similar approaches. Find
them. Find their technical papers, find the applications that they’re look-
ing at, and decide whether they might also be of interest to you. It could

be that the technology is great, but the work that first attracted your atten-
tion is not the best example of it.
As you go through this stage, you should keep all of the technical
material you gather, organizing and reorganizing as you go. Chances are,
you’ll get a lot more out of it later this way.
What are the application’s requirements?

The next stage is to find out as much as you can about what it will take for
any technology to succeed in the application in question, that is, the tech-
nical, ethical, legal, and commercial requirements, as well as any potential
obstacles to success. For this stage, people are, again, ideal for pointing
you in the right direction, but you should also be able to find a lot of the
answers you need by looking at written resources. There may be relevant
technical papers, for instance, and you may also find journalism about the
applications in the technical press.
Realistically, neither the technical literature nor the technical press will
give you all the information you need if you’re trying to do a deep dive
into a new application. What they can provide you with is a basic grasp of
concepts and jargon. Once you have these, you should be in a better position
to look for books that can help you push your expertise on to the next
level. Even if your deadline won’t give you time to properly read them,
skimming through a book can often be useful for giving you confidence
that you know what the key issues are.
The very best way to get information about applications, however, is to
talk to the people who make them happen, once you’ve prepared your
mind well enough to be able to ask the right questions and cope with
potentially jargon-filled answers. An extremely efficient way to do this is
to go to a relevant technical conference to immerse yourself in the field
and surround yourself with people who are expert in it.
What is the competition?

The sources we’ve just discussed to explore potential applications are exactly
the same as you can use to find different current or potential solutions:
people, the technical literature, the trade press, and conferences. Where
companies and/or research groups are being open about the problems they
are tackling, you can use all of these. The main thing to remember is that
there are three types of competition: the way we do things now, solutions that
are in development, and accomplishing things a completely different way.
Researching today’s technology should be easy. It’s finding tomorrow’s
competition that’s hard, especially because, in any emerging industry, you
tend to find companies that are acting in stealth mode. They have every
intention of entering a particular market but don’t want anyone to know
about it. There can be many reasons for this: they may not want to give
their competitors any extra motivation to improve their offerings, they
may want to sign the contracts on funding from publicity-shy investors,
or they may be in the process of nailing down their intellectual property.
Despite this, there are a few techniques you can use that could allow you
to get a glimpse of the competition that is out there. First, if you want to
have inside information on an industry, tech bloggers can be really useful.
On the other end of the scale, in terms of formality, patent databases can
be a mine of information about who has been working in a particular area
recently. A variation on this theme, especially for consumer products, is to
search for trademarks, because the logos and product names that a com-
pany registers are a good clue to what they plan to bring out.
Famously, journalists are told that if they want to get to the bottom of a
story, they need to follow the money. In some cases, this can be true of
engineers too. If you’re trying to find long-term trends in a potential com-
petitor, annual reports—in conjunction with other stories in the tech-
nical press—can be helpful. If you’ve been following what a company says
about its direction in a few annual reports, then this—in combination
with stories in the technical press about the research it’s done, the people
it’s hired, and the intellectual property it’s licensed or registered—can give
you a very good indication about whether it is likely to become a competitor
in a particular area.
Going back to the technical side of things, another way to find competi-
tors is to identify the key publications of individuals involved. You then
use forward citations to find the work their papers have inspired, and
check to see who has licensed their patents.
What are the features of the competing technologies?

The first task when trying to identify potential features and drawbacks of
both the primary technology and its competition is to try to go and look
at things in person: real applications, real experiments, and real devices
being used or demonstrated in real time. If you can visit the lab or com-
pany or site where the new technology is being used or tested, you will
learn a great deal that you couldn’t have otherwise. In part, this is because

different senses are engaged when you see things for real: vision, hear-
ing, sense of smell, proprioception, and touch all get a chance to contrib-
ute, not just the parts of your brain that deal with words and pictures.
This brings us to one last group who can provide information and may
determine whether or not you are allowed to do a lab visit: those who
work in business development, and PR (public/press relations) people.
As with all these sources, we’ll provide more detail later in the chapter.
A simple plan
If you were going to make your life as simple as possible while also being as
thorough as possible in your research, your project plan might look some-
thing like the following. First, you find a conference that covers the applica-
tion or technology you’re interested in. It doesn’t need to be the definitive
conference in the field, but it should do a reasonable job covering most of the
major approaches and giving you an introduction. Most importantly, it
should give you a good list of keywords for the next phase of research.
Next, you go away and do some research online, looking at the trade
press, technical literature, and patents. What are the major applications
and/or the most important features of any given solution? Which seem to
be the most important companies and research projects working on this?
As you identify key groups, you should try to make arrangements to do
site visits (if that’s possible within your time/money budget). Make sure
that each one informs the next and that, as new issues arise, you go back
and do the online research that will make sure that you understand them
fully. Be prepared not only with questions about the lab you are visiting
but also concepts that you do/don’t fully understand, issues relating to the
application, competition, and so on. This will ensure that you make the
best out of every opportunity and that, each time, you ratchet up your
own levels of knowledge, insight, and expertise.
Finally, you would go to another conference on the subject. This time,
you should find—even if you can’t follow all the technical issues—that you
have enough expertise to understand most of what you hear. You should
be able to see more clearly the similarities and differences between differ-
ent approaches and understand why they are (or are not) important.
Most importantly, this conference will give you the opportunity to talk
to other experts on an almost-equal level. In fact, if you’ve been able to
follow the rest of the plan, by this stage you should know almost as much
about what’s going on in the field (at least at a high level) as they do and
be able to ask really good questions. This will allow you to consolidate the
knowledge you have, as well as filling in any gaps.
Real life steps in

Most people reading this book will not have the time, the money, or the
access to follow this ideal route from being a novice to an expert. The
main principles to bear in mind are as follows:
• Do your homework: Try to do as much online research as possible.
• Get regular reality checks: If you can’t do lab visits or conferences, at least
make sure to talk to people, whether in person or virtually.
• Remember, everybody lies: Just because someone is an expert and they say
something, that doesn’t mean it’s true . . . not even if it’s in print.
We’ll deal with this last point in Chapter 3. It is key to understand that
everyone writes from their own perspective and agenda, and to figure out
what these are for your sources. If you can do this, it will make analysis of
the information you have gathered much more straightforward.
Types of sources
Keywords
These are critical to all research, because, without them, you will never
find the material you are looking for. Very different terms can be used to
mean very similar things: consider the relationships between artificial
intelligence and machine learning; hydrocarbons and oil and gas; and
CMOS and semiconductor processing. In each case, you might well find
information of interest if one keyword matches, even if the other (your
chosen topic) is nowhere to be found.
Keeping track of these keywords is worthwhile because they change over
time: words come in and out of fashion. Also, similar approaches to the
same problem may be called different things depending on your commu-
nity, your industry, and your institution. You don’t want to miss some cru-
cial information because you didn’t know the right keywords to look out for.
Search engines
The web is a brilliant source of information if you use search engines cre-
atively. The problem, of course, is not finding information at all, but finding

the right kind and quality. For instance, put in the name of a researcher,
the kind of technology they’re working on, and the words +corporate or
+company or even +Corp. or +Ltd., and you might find information about
a start-up company they are working on. Search for keywords related to
the application with some similar company-related words, and you may
find start-ups in the field. If you’re lucky, you’ll then find websites with all
sorts of information.
The key to smart searching is to think not only of the subject you want
to address, or the person, but the kind of information you are looking for.
For instance, if you add the words references or bibliography to the rest of
your search, you’re more likely to pull up technical papers. If you add the
name of the company or institution that the researcher is from, you’re
more likely to find technical papers by that person (rather than those that
cite that person). If you think carefully, you can reduce the millions or
thousands of search engine hits to a more manageable tens or hundreds,
with the most relevant more likely to appear on the first page.
There are many advanced search functions, most notably, excluding
words you know should not appear (by using a minus sign) and requiring
words that must appear (by using a plus sign). Time spent experimenting
with the more sophisticated features on the various search engines you
expect to use (whether they search patents, the technical literature, or the
whole internet) is time well spent. The more intelligently you use them,
the faster you will find the information you need.
Technical
The technical literature
Journal articles, conference proceedings, and so on can be daunting
because each paper is written for a specific technical audience (which may
or may not include you). This means that most articles will likely be filled
with jargon. However, they are generally the most reliable account you
can find of a specific piece of work because they are (mostly) peer-
reviewed. This means their content was examined by other experts/
competitors before publication. They are great starting points for your
research, in part because the introductory section often highlights the sta-
tus quo and competing work, and in part because they include references
to related work that may be worth looking at.
These days, you can often find the papers you need using the web, but
accessing them may be a different story. If you are affiliated with a university
or a company that subscribes to a lot of journals, then it may simply be a
question of acquiring the right access credentials or going in through a
secure network. However, if you’re independent, it may be expensive to
get access. On the plus side, open access journals are becoming increas-
ingly common, and abstracts can almost always be found for free and may
be enough at the early stages of the research process.
One caveat, however: not everything is available using a typical web-
based search engine (even Google Scholar). There are often special collec-
tions of articles that are held by individual publishers, learned societies,
universities, and so on, and these would be difficult to find by doing a sim-
ple web search. If you have access to a technical library, it is definitely worth
tracking down any such collections that may have the material you need.
Another thing to remember is that there is often a long time lag (months
to a year) between when work is completed and when you can read about
it in the literature. This is another reason why talking to people can be so
productive. You can find out what’s going on now and ask for the latest
information. They might not give it to you, but even a hint can lead you to
another thread that you can try to piece together through other means.
One last thing: if you find that the technical literature trail goes cold
(you’ve been following a series of papers by a group, individual, or com-
pany, but they suddenly stop), it’s worth checking the patent databases
instead (see “Patents”). When a decision is made to commercialize a new
technology—or even to consider doing so—the emphasis switches from
publishing it to protecting it.
Forward and backward citations

If you find a paper that you think is interesting, you can do a search for
forward citations to find other people who thought it was interesting too
(i.e. people who cited that paper in their own work). Such citations can be
very useful because they allow you to move forward in the life of the original
idea to see how it is being used now (and by whom).
A backward citation, on the other hand, can be done by simply finding
interesting papers in the reference list or bibliography that comes with a
paper. These can be very important because there are often key papers
that everyone feels they have to reference (to do with a technology, an
application, or both) that then have the power to unlock the literature

f urther. So, you can start with one paper, go one or two steps back to find
a really key publication, and then find forward citations from that; that
way, you have a good chance of finding most of the people working in a
particular area.
The one thing you must remember, however, is that just small shifts in
perspective, approach, or background can mean that what people see as
the key papers in their field may differ, which means they may not all be
caught by the forward citation approach. Sometimes, this artificial frac-
turing of the literature happens for benign reasons (ideas grow up inde-
pendently in adjacent fields and never quite come together). At other
times, it’s a result of people attempting to make their work appear distinct
from others, allowing them to become a big fish in a small pond to add to
their prestige.
Books and book chapters

Although a good book about your application (if there is one) can save
you a huge amount of time, a bad one can waste almost as much. It’s
important that—before you jump into spending a lot of time reading
one person’s point of view—you get validation that it is one that will
help you. This might come in the form of a recommendation by one of
your expert contacts, or because you’ve done your homework and know
that a particular book is covering the application in a way that’s helpful
to you.
The main thing with books is to be selective and to remember that the
author is telling the story of their field from their own point of view (see
Chapter 3). Note that, as was mentioned before, it often doesn’t make
sense to read the whole book, even if it is relevant. In any project where
time is constrained, it makes sense to skim for sections of relevance and
only read carefully where you know this will help. This can be difficult for
people who are methodical and like to be thorough (a large fraction of
scientists and engineers), but it’s important to maximize the information
you can gather in the time you have.
Book chapters can also be extremely useful, especially in relatively new
application areas where the field hasn’t had a sufficiently long period of
stability for someone to have time to write a book. For instance, you might
not find a whole book on sensor networks for urban applications, but
instead a good chapter on them in a book about smart cities.
Commercial/technical
Patents
Intellectual property laws allow companies to protect their inventions in
return for releasing their ideas to the public. This trade-off is intended to
benefit progress in technology because, without the guarantee that no one
else can steal and profit from their innovations for a decent period of time,
everyone would keep them secret.
Until relatively recently, patent searches were expensive and difficult:
this is no longer true. You can now search patent databases like Google
Patents or Espacenet for free.
Patent databases are like any other: the better you are at searching, the
more relevant the information you will find. Remember to look not only
for solutions to a narrow technical problem but also for different ways of
addressing the wider application (at least initially). This will help expose
you to approaches you may have missed otherwise. Then, when you’re
trying to narrow the search, remember to focus on patents filed recently
(most likely for companies in stealth mode) and to think carefully about
the kinds of terms that you would expect to see in inventions related to the
problem you are researching.
Also, rather than target a subject, you may choose to target individ-
uals or companies who are doing work in a particular area. If they have
filed a patent, this may well be an indication that they intend to com-
mercialize it.
Once you have an interesting patent, you can use all the other tools
we’ve discussed to further research the company, licensees, the individual
patent holders, and even any new keywords. These links may lead you to
information about efforts in this area that could end up being important.
For instance, you might find more papers by the inventors, which give
more information about what the invention will most likely be used for, or
a story about how the company that owns the patent has done some kind
of licensing deal with a company in the application field. All of this is good
information.
Unfortunately, patents are deliberately written to be difficult to read. It’s
probably easier to consider them as confirmations of activity, or links
through to further information, rather than technical resources in their
own right. For this reason, you may find that your research involves sev-
eral cycles of talking to people, going to the trade press, going to the

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
How the Lord Cromwell[2006] exalted
from meane estate, was after by the
enuie of the Bishop of Winchester,
and other his complices, brought to
vntimely end, Anno Dom. 1540.
1.
“Wak’d, and trembling betwixt rage and dread

With the loud slander (by the impious time)
That of my actions euery where is spread,
Through which to honor falsely I should clime,
From the sad dwelling of th’vntimely dead,
To quit me of that execrable crime,
Cromwell appeares his wretched plight to show,
Much that can tell, one much that once did know.[2007]
2.
Roughly not made vp in the common mould,

That with the vulgar vilely I should die,
What thing so strange of Cromwell is not told?
What man more prais’d? who more condemn’d then I?
That with the world when I am waxed old,
Most t’were vnfit that fame of me should lie
With fables vaine my historie to fill,
Forcing my good, excusing of my ill.
3.
You, that but hearing of my hated name,
Your ancient malice instantly bewray,
And for my sake your ill deserued blame
Vpon my legend publikely shall lay:
Would you forbeare to blast me with defame,
Might I so meane a priuiledge but pray,
He that three ages hath endur’d your wrong,
Heare him a little that hath heard you long.
4.
Since Rome’s sad ruine heere by me began,

Who her religion pluckt vp by the root,
Of the false world such hate for which I wan,
Which still at me her poisned’st darts doth shoot:
That to excuse it, do the best I can,
Little, I feare, my labour me will boot:
Yet will I speake my troubled heart to ease,
Much to the mind, her selfe it is to please.
5.
O powerfull number, from whose stricter law

Heart-mouing musicke did receiue the ground
Which men to faire ciuilitie did draw
With the brute beast when lawlesse he was found:
O, if according to the wiser saw
There be a high diuinitie in sound,
Be now abundant prosp’rously to aide
The pen prepar’d my doubtfull case to pleade.
6.
Putney the place made blessed in my birth,

Whose meanest cottage simplie me did shrowd,
To me as dearest of the English earth:
So of my bringing that poore village prou’d,
Though in a time when neuer lesse the dearth
Of happie wits, yet mine so well allow’d
That with the best she boldly durst confer
Him that his breath[2008] acknowledged from her.
7.
Twice flow’d proud Thames, as at my comming wood,

Striking the wondring borderers with feare,
And the pale genius of that aged flood
Vnto my mother[2009] labouring did appeare,
And with a countenance much distracted stood,
Threatning the fruit her pained wombe should beare:
My speedie birth being added thereunto,
Seem’d to foretell that much I came to do.
8.
That[2010] was reserued for those worser daies,

As the great ebbe vnto so long a flow,
When what those ages formerly did raise,
This, when I liu’d, did lastly ouerthrow,
And that great’st labour of the world did seaze,
Only for which immedicable blow
Due to that time, me dooming heauen ordain’d,
Wherein confusion absolutely raign’d.
9.
Vainly yet noted this prodigious signe,

Often predictions of most fearefull things,
As plagues, or warre, or great men to decline,
Rising of commons, or the death of kings:
But some strange newes though euer it diuine,
Yet forth them not immediatly it brings,
Vntill th’effects men afterward did learne,
To know that me it chiefly did concerne.
10.
Whil’st yet my father by his painfull trade,

Whose laboured anuile only was his fee,
Whom my great towardnesse strongly did perswade
In knowledge to haue educated mee:
But death did him vnluckily inuade,
Ere he the fruits of his desire could see,
Leauing me yong, then little that did know
How me the heauens had purpos’d to bestow.
11.
Hopelesse as helpelesse most might me suppose,

Whose meannesse seem’d their abiect breath to draw:
Yet did my breast that glorious fire inclose,
Which their dull purblind ignorance not saw,
Which still is setled vpon outward showes,
The vulgar’s iudgement euer is so raw,
Which the vnworthiest sottishly do loue
In their owne region properly that moue.
12.
Yet me my fortune so could not disguise,

But through this cloud were some that did me know,
Which then the rest more happie or more wise,
Me did relieue when I was driuen low,
Which, as the staier, by which I first did rise,
When to my height I afterward did grow,
Them to requite my bounties were so hie,
As made my fame through euery eare to flie.
13.
That height and godlike puritie of minde

Resteth not still, where titles most adorne
With any, nor peculiarly confinde
To names, and to be limited doth scorne:
Man doth the most degenerate from kinde,
Richest and poorest both alike are borne:
And to be alwaies pertinently good,
Followes not still the greatnes of our blood.
14.
Pitie it is, that to one vertuous man

That marke him lent to gentrie to aduance,
Which first by noble industrie he wan,
His baser issue after should inhance,
And the rude slaue not any good that can,
Such should thrust downe by what is his by chance:
As had not he been first that him did raise,
Nere had his great heire wrought his grandsire’s
praise.
15.
How weake art thou that makest it thy end

To heape such worldly dignities on thee,
When vpon fortune only they depend,
And by her changes gouerned must bee?
Besides the dangers still that such attend,
Liuel’est of all men purtraied out in mee,
When that, for which I hated was of all,
Soon’st from me fled, scarse tarrying for my fall.
16.
You that but boast your ancestors proud stile,

And the large stem whence your vaine greatnes grew,
When you your selues are ignorant and vile,
Nor glorious thing dare actually pursue,
That all good spirits would vtterly exile,
Doubting their worth should else discouer you,
Giuing your selues vnto ignoble things:
Base I proclaime you though deriu’d from kings.
17.
Vertue, but poore, God in this earth doth place

’Gainst the rude world to stand vp in his right,
To suffer sad affliction and disgrace,
Not ceasing to pursue her with despight:
Yet when of all she is accounted base,
And seeming in most miserable plight,
Out of her power new life to her doth take,
Least then dismai’d when all do her forsake.
18.
That is the man of an vndaunted spirit,

For her deare sake that offereth him to dye,
For whom, when him the world doth disinherit,
Looketh vpon it with a pleased eye,
What’s done for vertue thinking it doth merit,
Daring the proudest menaces defie,
More worth then life, how ere the base world rate him,
Belou’d of heauen, although the earth doth hate him.
19.
Iniurious time, vnto the good vniust,

O, how may weake posteritie suppose
Euer to haue their merit from the dust,
’Gainst them thy partialitie that knowes!
To thy report, O, who shall euer trust,
Triumphant arches building vnto those
Allow’d the longest memorie to haue,
That were the most vnworthie of a graue?
20.
But my cleere mettle had that powerfull heat,

As it not turn’d with all that fortune could:
Nor when the world me terriblest did threat,
Could that place win[2011] which my hie thoughts did
hold,
That waxed still more prosperously great,
The more the world me stroue to haue control’d,
On my owne columnes constantly to stand,
Without the false helpe of another’s hand.
21.
My youthfull course thus wisely did I steere,

T’auoid those rockes my wracke that else did thret:
Yet some faire hopes from farre did still appeere,
If that too much my wants me did not let:
Wherefore my selfe aboue my selfe to beare,
Still as I grew, I knowledge stroue to get,
To perfect that which in the embryon was,
Whose birth, I found, time well might bring to passe.
22.
But when my meanes to faile me I did finde,

My selfe to trauell presently betooke,[2012]
As much distastfull[2013] to my noble minde,
That the vile world into my wants should looke,
And of my selfe industriously[2014] inclinde,
To measure other’s actions with my booke,
I might my iudgement rectifie[2015] thereby,
In matters that were difficult and hie.
23.
When, loe, it hapt that fortune, as my guide,

Of me did with such prouidence dispose,
That th’English merchants then, who did reside
At Antwerpe, me their secretarie chose,
(As though in me to manifest her pride)
Whence to those principalities I rose,
To pluck me downe, whence afterward she fear’d
Beyond her power that almost she had rear’d.
24.
When first the wealthie Netherlands me traind

In wise commerce, most proper to the place,
And from my countrie carefully me wain’d,
That with the world did chiefly winne[2016] me grace,
Where great experience happily I gaind:
Yet here I seem’d but tutor’d for a space,
For hie imploiment otherwise ordaind,
Till which the time I idely entertaind.
25.
For hauing Boston businesse in[2017] hand,

The charge thereof on Chambers being laid,
Coming to Flanders, hapt to vnderstand
Of me, whom he requested him to aid:
Of which, when I the benefit had scand,
Weighing what time at Antwerpe I had staid,
Quickly me wonne[2018] faire Italy to trie,
Vnder a cheerefull and more luckie skie:
26.
For what the meanest cleerely makes to shine,

Youth, wit, and courage, all in me concurre
In euery proiect, that so powerfull trine
By whose kind working brauely I did sturre,
Which to each hie and glorious designe
(The time could offer) freely did me spurre,
As forcing fate some new thing to prepare
(Shewing successe) t’attempt that could me dare.
27.
Where now my spirit got roomth it selfe to show,

To the fair’st pitch doth make a gallant flight,
From things that too much earthly were and low,
Strongly attracted by a genuine light,
Where higher still it euery day did grow:
And being in so excellent a plight,
Crau’d but occasion happily to proue
How much it sate each vulgar spirit aboue.
28.
The good successe th’affaires of England found,

Much prais’d the choice of me that had been made:
For where most men the depth durst hardly sound,
I held it nothing boldly through to wade
My selfe, and through the strait’st waies I woond:
So could I act, so well I could perswade,
As meerely iouiall, me to mirth applie,[2019]
Compos’d of freedome and alacritie.
29.
Not long it was ere Rome of me did ring

(Hardly shall Rome so full daies see again)
Of freemen’s catches to the pope I sing,
Which wan much licence to my countrimen,
Thither the which I was the first did bring,
That were vnknowne to Italy till then:
Light humours, them when iudgement doth direct,
Euen of the wise win plausible respect.
30.
And those, from whom that pensions were allow’d,

And heere[2020] did for intelligence remaine,
Vnder my power themselues were glad to shroud,
Russell and Pace, yea, oftentimes were faine,
When as their names they durst not haue auow’d,
Me into their societie t’retaine,
Rising before me, mightie as they were,
Great though at home, yet did they need me there.
31.
In forraine parts nere friends I yet forsake,

That had before been deeply bound to mee,
And would againe I vse of them should make,
But still my starres command I should be free,
And all those offers lightly from me shake,
Which to requite, I fettred else might bee,
And though that oft great perils me oppungne,
And meanes were weak, my mind was euer strong.
32.
And[2021] those great wants fate to my youth did tie

Me from delights[2022] of those rich countries driue,
Thereby inforc’d with painfull industrie
Against affliction manfully to striue,
Vnder her burthen faintly not to lie,
But since my good I hardly must deriue,
Vnto the same to make my selfe a way[2023]
Through all the power against me she could lay.
33.
As a comedian where my[2024] life I led,

For so a while my need did me constraine,
With other my poore countrimen (that plai’d)
Thither that came in hope of better gaine,
Whereas when fortune seem’d me low to tread
Vnder her feet, she set me vp againe,
Vntill the[2025] vse me bad her not to feare
Her good and ill that patiently could beare.
34.
Till Charles the fift th’emperiall power did bend

’Gainst Rome, which Burbon skilfully did guide,
Which sore declining[2026] Italy did rend:
For th’right that him her holinesse denide,
Wholly her selfe enforced to defend
Gainst him that iustly punished her pride,
To which my selfe I lastly did betake,
Seeing[2027] thereof what fortune ment to make.
35.
And at the siege with that great generall seru’d,

When he did[2028] girt her stubborne waste with steele,
Within her walles who well neer being staru’d,
And that with faintnes she began to reele,
Shewing her selfe a little as she swaru’d:
First her then noting I began to feele,
She whose great power so far abroad did rome,
What in her selfe she truly was at home.
36.
That the great schoole of the false world was then,

Where her’s their subtill practises did vie,
Amongst that mightie confluence of men,
French plots propt vp by English policie,
The German powers, false shuffling, and agen
All countermin’d by skilfull Italy,
Each one in possibility to win,
Great rests were vp and mightie hands were in.
37.
Here first to worke my busie braine was set,

(My inclination finding it to please
This stirring world which strongly still did whet)
To temper in so dangerous assaies,
Which did strange formes of policies beget:
Besides in times so turbulent as these,
Wherein my studies hopefully did[2029] bend
Vnto that point the wisest[2030] made their end.
38.
And my experience happily me taught

Into the secrets of those times to see,
From whence to England afterward I brought
Those slights of state deliu’red vnto[2031] me,
In t’which were then but very[2032] few that sought,
Nor did with th’umour of that age agree,
After did great and fearfull[2033] things effect,
Whose secret working few did then suspect.
39.
When though t’were long it hapned yet at last

Some hopes me homeward secretly allur’d,
When many perils strangely I had past,
As many sad calamities endur’d
Beyond the moone, when I began to cast
By my rare parts what place might be procur’d,
If they at home were to the mightie knowne,
How they would seeme compared with their owne.
40.
Or if that there the great should me neglect,

As I the worst that vainely did not feare,
To my experience how to gaine respect
In other countries that doe hold it deare,
And now occasion seemed to reiect,[2034]
Whil’st still before me other rising were,
And some themselues had mounted to the skie,
Little before vnlike to thriue as I.
41.
When now in England bigamie with blood

Lately begot by luxurie and pride,
In their great’st fulnes peremptorie stood:
Some thereunto that diligently pri’d,[2035]
Stillie[2036] were fishing in that troubled flood
For future changes wisely to prouide,
Finding the world so rankly then to swell,
That till it brake it neuer could be well.
42.
But floting long vpon my first arriue,

Whil’st many doubts me seemed to appall,
Like to a barke that with the tide doth driue,
Hauing not[2037] left to fasten it withall,
Thus with the time by suffring I doe striue
Vnto[2038] that harbor doubtfull yet to fall:
Vntill inforc’d to put it to the chance,
Casting the fair’st my fortune to aduance.
43.
Making my selfe to mightie Wolsey knowne,

That Atlas, which the gouernement vpstai’d,
Which[2039] from meane place in little time was growne
Vp vnto him, that[2040] weight vpon him lai’d,
And being got the neerest to his throne,
He the more easly the[2041] great kingdome swai’d,
Leaning thereon his wearied selfe to breath,
Whil’st euen the greatest farre sat him[2042] beneath.
44.
Where learned More and Gardiner I met,

Men in those times immatchable for wit,
Able that were the dullest spirit to whet,
And did my humour excellently fit,
Into their ranke that worthily did get
There as their proud competitor to sit,
One excellence to many is the mother,
Wit doth,[2043] as creatures, one beget another.
45.
This founder of the palaces of kings,

Whose veines with more then vsuall spirit were fild,
A man ordained to the mighti’st things,
In Oxford then determining to build
To Christ a colledge, and together brings,
All that thereof the great foundation wills,
There me imploies, whose industrie he found
Worthie to worke vpon the noblest ground.
46.
Yet in the entrance wisely that did feare

Coyne might fall short, yet with this worke on fire,
Wherefore such houses as religious were
Whose being no necessitie require,
But that the greater very well might beare,
From Rome the Card’nall cunningly did hire,
Winning withall his soueraigne to consent,
Both colouring with so holy an intent.
47.
This like a symptome to a long disease

Was the forerunner to this mightie fall,
And but too vnaduisedly did sease
Vpon the part that ruinated all,
Which, had the worke been of so many daies,
And more againe, recouer hardly shall:
But loe, it sunke, which time did long vphold,
Where now it lies euen leueld with the mould.
48.
Thus thou, great Rome, here first wast ouerthrowne

Thy future harmes that blindly couldst not se,
And in this worke they only were thine owne,
Whose knowledge lent that deadly wound to thee,
Which to the world before had they not showne,
Nere had those secrets been descri’d by mee,
Nor by thy wealth so many from the plow
Worne those hie types wherein they florish now.
49.
After when as the cardinall againe

Into hie fauour[2044] with the king mee brought,
With[2045] whom my selfe so well I did demeane,
As that I seem’d to exercise his thought,
And his great liking strongly did retaine
With what before my master me had[2046] taught,
From whose example, by those cels were small,
Sprang the subuersion lastly of them all.
50.
Yet many a let was cast into the way,

Wherein I ran so steddily and right,
And many a snare my aduersaries lay,
Much wrought they with their power, much with their
slight,
Wisely perceiuing that my smallest stay
Fully requir’d the vtmost of their might,
To my ascendant hasting me[2047] to clime,
There as the first predomining the time.
51.
Knowing what wealth me earnestly did wooe,

Which I through Wolsey hapned had to finde,
And could the path most perfectly vntoo,
The king thereafter earnestly inclin’d,
Seeing besides what after I might doe
If so great power mee fully were assign’d,
By all their meanes against me strongly wrought,
Lab’ring as fast to bring their church to nought.
52.
Whil’st to the king continually I sue,

And in this businesse faithfully did stirre
Strongly t’approue[2048] my iudgement to be true
Gainst those who most supposed me to erre,
Nor the least meanes which any way I knew
Might grace me, or my purposes preferre
Did I omit, till wonne I had[2049] his eare,
Most that me mark’d, when least he seem’d to heare.
53.
This wound to them thus violently giuen,

Enuie at me her sharpest darts doth[2050] roue,
Affecting the supremacie of heauen,
As the first giants warring against Ioue,
Heap’d hils on hils, the gods till they had driuen
The meanest shapes of earthly things to proue:
So must I shift from them against me rose,
Mortall their hate, as mightie were my foes.
54.
But their great force against me wholly bent
Preuail’d vpon my purposes so farre,
That I my ruine scarsely could preuent,
So momentarie worldly fauours are,
That till the vtmost of their spight was spent,
Had not my spirit maintain’d a manly warre,
Risen they had when laid I had been low,[2051]
Vpon whose ruine after I did grow.
55.
When the great king their strange reports that tooke

That as[2052] pernitious as they potent were,
Which[2053] at the faire growth of my fortune strooke,
Whose deadly malice blame me not to feare,
Me at the first so violently shooke,
That they this frame were likely downe to beare,
If resolution with a setled brow
Had not vpheld my peremptorie vow.
56.
Yet these encounters thrust me not awry,

Nor could my courses force me to forsake,
After this shipwrack I againe must trie,
Some happier voiage hopefull still to make,
The plots that barren long we see did lie,
Some fitting season plentifully take,
One fruitfull haruest frankly doth restore
What many winters hindred had before.
57.
That to account I strictly call my wit

How it this while had managed my state,
My soule in counsell summoning to sit,
If possible to turne the course of fate,
For waies there be the greatest things to hit,
If men could find the peremptorie gate,
And since I once was got so neere the brinke
More then before, ’twould grieue me now to sinke.
58.
Bedford,[2054] whose life (some said) that I had sau’d

In Italy, one me that[2055] sauoured most,
And reuerend Hayles, who but occasion crau’d
To shew his loue, no lesse that I had cost,
Who to the king perceiuing me disgrac’d,
Whose fauour I vnluckily had lost,
Both with him great, a foot set in withall
If not to stay, to qualifie my fall.
59.
High their regard, yet higher was their hap,

Well neere quite sunke, recouer me that could,
And once more get me into fortune’s lap,
Which well my selfe might teach me there to hold,
Escap’d out of so dangerous a trap,
Whose praise by me to ages shall be told,
As the two props by which I only rose,
When most supprest, most trod on by my foes.
60.
This me to vrge the premunire wonne,

Ordain’d in matters dangerous and hie,
In t’which the heedlesse prelacie were runne,
That backe vnto the papacie did flie,
Sworne to that sea, and what before was done
Due to the king, dispensed were thereby,
In t’which first entring offred me the meane
That to throw downe, alreadie that did leane.
61.
This was to me that ouerflowing sourse,

From whence his bounties plentifully spring,
Whose speedie current with vnusuall force
Bare me into the bosome of the king,
By putting him into that readie course
Which soone to passe his purposes might bring,
Where those which late emperiously control’d me
Pale strooke[2056] with feare stood trembling to behold
me.
62.
When state to me those ceremonies show’d

That to so great a fauorite were due,
And fortune still with honors did me load,
As though no meane she in my rising knew,
Or heauen to me more then to man had ow’d,
(What to the world vnheard of was and new)
And was to other sparing of her store
Till she could giue, or aske I could[2057] no more.
63.
Those high preferments he vpon me laid,

Might make the world me publikely to know
Such as in[2058] iudgement rightly being wai’d,
Seemed too great for me to vndergo,
Nor could his hand from powring on be stai’d,
Vntill I so abundantly did flow,
That looking downe whence lately I was cloame,
Danger bid[2059] feare, if further I should roame.
64.
For first from knighthood rising in degree,

The office of the iewell house my lot,
After the Roles he frankely gaue to mee,
From whence a priuie counsellor I got,
Chose of[2060] the garter: and the[2061] earle to bee
Of Essex: yet sufficient these not[2062]
But to the great vicegerencie I grew,
Being a title as supreame as new.
65.
So well did me these dignities befit,

And honor so me euery way became,
As more then man I had been made for it,
Or as from me it had deriu’d the name:
Where was that man[2063] whose loue I not requit
Beyond his owne imaginarie aime,
Which had me succour’d, neerely being driuen,
As things to me that idlely were not giuen?
66.
What tongue so slow the tale shall not report

Of hospitable Friscobald and mee,
And shew in how reciprocall a sort
My thankes did with his courtesie agree,
When as my meanes in Italy were short
That me relieu’d, lesse great that[2064] would not bee,
When I of England chancellor was made,[2065]
His former bounties librally repai’d?
67.
The maner briefly gentler muse relate,

Since oft before it wisely hath been told,
The sudden change of vnauoided fate,
That famous merchant, reuerend Friscobald,
Grew poore, and the small remnant of his state

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Explaining the Future: How to

Research, Analyze, and Report on

xii | Acknowle dgments

3. Perspectives and Agendas 41

Case Study Part I: Research and Analysis 85

5. Audience and Explanation 112

6. Technical Argument and Structure 132

Case Study Part II: Report 180

H eadlines about research generally have the same form:

• “Breakthrough in Nanotechnology Will Enable Low-Power Circuits”

These headlines intrinsically encode society’s value system when it comes

1 See Office of National Statistics, Statistical Bulletin: Gross Domestic Expenditure

Question 1: What’s so special about

2 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

4 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

6 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

8 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

10 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

No problem for the solution? Be creative . . .

Question 3: What is the effect of time?

12 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Money, momentum, and market

14 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Question 4: What is the competition?

The status quo

Something completely different

16 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

18 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

20 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Within these sections, of course, you’ll make further divisions to cover

Example work flow

Which application is the most promising?

22 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

What are the application’s requirements?

What is the competition?

What are the features of the competing technologies?

24 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Real life steps in

26 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Forward and backward citations

28 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

Books and book chapters

30 | EXPL AINING THE FUTURE

“Wak’d, and trembling betwixt rage and dread

Roughly not made vp in the common mould,

Since Rome’s sad ruine heere by me began,

O powerfull number, from whose stricter law

Putney the place made blessed in my birth,

Twice flow’d proud Thames, as at my comming wood,

That[2010] was reserued for those worser daies,

Vainly yet noted this prodigious signe,

Whil’st yet my father by his painfull trade,

Hopelesse as helpelesse most might me suppose,

Yet me my fortune so could not disguise,

That height and godlike puritie of minde

Pitie it is, that to one vertuous man

How weake art thou that makest it thy end

You that but boast your ancestors proud stile,

Vertue, but poore, God in this earth doth place

That is the man of an vndaunted spirit,

Iniurious time, vnto the good vniust,

But my cleere mettle had that powerfull heat,

My youthfull course thus wisely did I steere,