Session Objectives

•  Define technology intelligence

• Identify the levels and importance of technology intelligence

• Explain how technology intelligence is gathered and analyzed and

incorporated into decision making

• Discuss the organizational challenges involved with making technology

intelligence meaningful for decision makers
 Technology Intelligence
• Activity that enables companies to identify the technological opportunities and threats that could affect
the future growth and survival of their business

• Aims to capture and distribute the technological information needed for strategic planning and decision
making

• Companies install an intelligence system (technology, market, business or competitive intelligence) to

collect and analyze information on market, product, and technology changes and on other environmental
transformations

• This helps increase their decision-making quality and competitiveness

• Intelligence uses information as raw material, screening, shifting, sorting, verifying, analyzing,
interpreting, and compiling it to create a useful output
Relationship – Data, Information, Intelligence

Infer
Intelligence

Interpret Information

Data
Gather
 Importance of Technology Intelligence
• As technology life cycles shorten and business become more globalized; having
effective TI capabilities is becoming increasingly important

• TI provides an understanding of current & potential changes taking place in the

environment

• TI provides important information for strategic decision-makers

• TI facilitates and fosters strategic thinking in organizations

• If conducted properly, TI leads to enhanced capacity & commitment to

understanding, anticipating and responding to external changes
 Benefits of Technology Intelligence
• Reduced Risk
 Technology-related decisions involve placing bets on the viability of products, projects, and technologies
 Decision making is fundamentally risky
 The degree of risk can be reduced by better understanding the external environment

• Questions to be answered
 Who will share the market with us?
 When will they enter?
 What technology will they use?
 How much market share will they capture

• Types of risks that can be encountered can be as follows:

 The risk of being blindsided by a competitor’s technology after having made a very large investment in a new development
 The risk of choosing the wrong technology to enter a new area or incorrectly reading the basis of technological competition
 The risk of basing product offerings on standards or specifications that differ from current or future industry standards
 The risk of early product obsolescence caused by a new technology trend
 Benefits of Technology Intelligence
• Enhanced Opportunities
 Technology intelligence is much more than a risk-reduction technique
 Extremely rich source of opportunities that would not otherwise be recognized. Careful examination
of external technology, products, and business conditions can reveal windows of opportunity in many
areas
 Controlling risk and identifying opportunities in technology are opposite sides of the same coin
• Opportunities Revealed by Technology Intelligence
 Gaps in patent coverage
 Partnering opportunities
 Licensing opportunities
 Technologies ripe for transfer
 Unmet customer needs
 Levels of Technology Intelligence
• Three levels of TI
 Macro level – technological trends & developments which can influence entire economy / major sectors
 Industry or business level - technological trends & developments which can influence specific industries /
businesses
 Program or project level – technological trends & developments which can influence specific technology related
program or project
• The above three levels differ in terms of
 Breadth of technology
 Clarity of trends
 Degree of precision of trends