Evaluation of Knowledge Management Technologies for the Support of Technology Forecasting

Today’s business environment is characterized by highly transparent markets and global competition. Technology life cycles are decreasing due to the fast pace at which development of new technologies is progressing. To compete in this environment, it is necessary to identify upcoming innovations and trends as early as possible to decrease uncertainty, implement technology leadership, and create competitive advantage. In a parallel development, the amount of information available is already vast and increasing daily. With a growing number of features for innovation in technology, each contributing a new need for analysis, technology forecasting has become increasingly challenging. The goal of our paper is to investigate to what extent knowledge management technologies support and improve the technology forecasting process to face the aforementioned problems successfully. Consequently, we will develop a characterization scheme which works as a framework for the subsequent evaluation of knowledge management technologies and apply this to a real world case.