Why do we need technology forecasts - Innovation vs InventionEfficiency vs Effectiveness

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[Music] hello welcome back to our course about technology for recursion for strategic decision making today we are going to discuss uh the question why do we need technology forecast do we really need uh this activity can we survive without um and why today and the technology forecast becomes more uh on demand than it was in the past in order to treat this topic we are going to make clear what is different between invention and innovation we are also going to discuss what is different between efficiency and effectiveness and as well about limiting resources the concept of limiting resources is quite important in order to be efficient not only for technology forecasting but for development of new technologies as well so if you just take point of view of technology management the main function of technology management in an organization and should be to argue when to invest on technology development and when to withdraw and those main function stay on the core of the demand for a custom because in order to take decision this decision has to be taken precisely in time for particular market it means in space and about specific technology but in order to understand how can we treat this decision with the help of forecast let us first uh elaborate a bit more on the difference between invention and innovation today those two words very often are used as a synonyms when they are absolutely not synonymous to our point of view okay and if you look from point of view of process we can see that the invention this is a new working principle okay which is feasible and which show us the performance which is uh different from previous working principle on the left part of this slide you can see the new uh kind of transmission for the bicycle it works it is tested and this is not something which was in practice before on the right side we can see the example of innovation here we have a production of new bicycles and what is innovative in these bicycles even from the picture it's not so evident but this is a airless tires it means with those tires you will never have a problem that you have a flat tire okay because there is no air inside if you try to measure the difference between invention and innovation the invention is usually measured in improvement of performance like how many kilometers per kilowatt hour you can run or another kind of uh performance measurement when innovation usually is something that we run production we sell on the market and we have a return in terms of financial resources whenever we are talking about innovation we are talking about production and profitability when we are talking about invention we are talking about feasibility and performance from point of view of decision making and from point of view of technology foreign it is important for us that there is a gap between invention and innovation there is a gap always a gap and sometimes this gap is really very big in terms of years to have a feasible concept idea even as a prototype it is not enough in order to be successful on the production and to be profitable for different system this time takes different time if you look just to the history of basic innovation the basic innovation those are the innovation on which our contemporary technological world is stained we can see that for instance between invention of low pressure machine which essentially this is a core ideas of a locomotive which we used for the transportation of good goods for the beginning of industrial revolution the distance between two things is 55 years 55 years we needed in order to be capable to build out of this invention which was feasible the innovation the locomotive which used steam engine for transportation of the goods and this is an interesting question why this is so long because in 55 years if you look this is a at least one generation of engineers if you invent something by being student and you have this duration between invention to innovation it can takes all entire life in order to see the fruits of your invention in fact one of the principal question of technology for recast is to answer when how many years it will take and where this invention has a chance to be implemented if you look to the history of basic innovations basic innovations like high voltage generator like you know uh cadell basic bicycle that probably most of you already have experience to use and other photography the production of cement we can always see that it was a gap between invention when it was feasible possible to do and innovation when it becomes regular production and those gaps sometimes very low for instance for the photography the gap between possibility to to make pictures and commercialization was 111 years the forecast technological forecast has to be capable to clearly depict how long it will take because do remember the very question which we are interested about is when to invest and when to withdraw so but how do we define uh basic innovation let's assume uh the definition originally uh suggested with the book of mr mensch that a technical event is a technological basic innovation when the newly discovered material on newly developed technique is being put into regular production for the first time regular production this is very important regular production it means we have a cycle in which we produce sell and we earn enough resources in order to continue our production which is interesting to see that for most of the invention and i would like to underline that 90 more than 95 of inventions they do not appear as innovation we have a millions of patents and out of them 95 more than 95 percent never become the innovation what happens why light is like that and from what it depends it depends on many things but we will see two or three reasons just few slides later because this is one of the essential question that our forecast reliable foreign technological forecast for strategic decision it has to answer shall we put our efforts to the invention or not even it looks like feasible and very promising let me share with you another example of the beginning of industrial error in order to give you idea how thousands of inventions have not appeared as innovation at the beginning of era of steam locomotive we used uh for the fuel the wood okay in the 19th century in u.s we had a very heavy problem because if you use a wood for this kind of locomotive you have a problem because wood cannot be brought completely so small particles of very high temperature of wood goes out through the exhausting pipes and cause fires you know the wildfire in the forest and in fact all around the roads the uh this was this was a main uh main danger and main problem at those times so that's why many inventors they try to resolve this problem so thousand patent patent smoke spark arrestors was suggested you on this picture you can see just just some of them different schemer and they were patented it means what does it mean patent patent this is something that uh entrepreneur they have to pay for this document because this document supposed to protect their intellectual property on the market so it means inventors they believed strongly that there will be some implementation but i would like to underline once again none of them was implemented none of them how it could happen what happened why we did not implement them because when you start to use a coal as a fuel you have no these problem the coal can be burned almost completely at least you have known this uh phenomenon when uh this is spa sparks goes out and goes the far around the around the railroad you see in fact even you have something feasible in your hand we need to be capable to predict will this feasible invention appear as innovation or not and this is a one of the very serious question uh for the technological forecast the technological forecast has to answer let us see how do we approach uh today and the the the question probably you already heard about so-called gartner cycle ah there is a question yeah please voila they have a question uh a question on uh so one of the this is this is uh completely new for me uh is that uh can patents are or the knowledge captured in patents be uh an input for technology forecasting itself so uh and where does it go uh as as you know the methodology itself where would patents as an input for uh the technology forecasting exercise go do we start with that or is does it appear somewhere in the middle or uh how how does it go i i don't think i have ever discussed this with you uh in fact the patents this is kind of background information thank you very much for your question the patents they they just show to what people are interested about because the patents they show the strong intention of people to push their solution to the market in fact uh when we look through the patents there are not so many not so much knowledge inside because the main function of patent is to protect intellectual property but not to present so the painted monitoring helps us to understand what is the okay temperature in a society about those of those topics by themselves unfortunately the patents they are not so good indicator to be reliable with foreign custom why because the companies they use different strategies sometimes the companies they build the patent umbrella in order not to uh disclose in front of their um competitors what they're working on there are another many different issues uh that are connected with the patents the patents it is not source of knowledge but this is a source of information what people are uh trying to push on the market today okay so this is a background it's not input information not output of forecast but this is kind of the ground that we have to keep keep in mind like you know when when you go outside you at least interested about what is the weather about you know outside uh did i answer your question yes yes i got it no i get it okay thank you thank you for the question well uh let's try to see what today and we can some of the decision makers they use instead of forecast okay the one of the very famous idea which was suggested years ago by a consulting company gartner a so-called hype cycle for emerging technologies which indicate visibility of the technology it means how many publications or how many patents do we have or how many publications in scientific literature and non-scientific literature we have and uh this gartner hype cycle should pretend to explain that any kind of new concept uh go through the several phases okay the phase one when we have a peak of inflated expectations after that the expectations start to decrease the visibility start to decrease and uh some some inventions they pass through this wave most of them they don't pass because the real implementation of the market what we say innovation starts somehow at the end of phase b when we have slope of enlightenment and when we have for instance on this slide i share with you uh the one of the very first hype cycle from 1995 and this what we can learn from this that in fact the decision makers they learned that they don't invest into technology because just it is hyped because when it is hyped it can soon disappear and they don't miss it because it is out it means we have to have something which will help us to put measurement on this time x unfortunately even for today we have no any uh time measurement on the hype cycles suggested for the for the different technology on this slide the emerging technologies for 2019 they put it you can see some name of technologies like biocheap they are today almost on the on the top of peak of expectations uh some of technologies like autonomous driving level four they are less visible but are they going to arrive to this slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity this is still open question this is a still open question so we need to uh when we make technology forecasting we need to clearly distinguish between differences what are our expectations and what are the real um capacities of technologies to answer today's needs or tomorrow's needs because the will technology be on the market one day or another one or how many years we need to wait until this technology will be on the market depends not only on feasibility not only it is possible but it depends also on other things like does it really solve some problems how costly this solution how long we need to learn in in order to be capable to use this solution because the technology this is the synergy of hardware our knowledge how to design manufacture and use it and the regulations that needed to run this technology and if you look from this point of view to our evolution of the technology we can arrive uh to the uh idea that uh in order to uh to be uh to be reliable with foreign casting we also need to make clear what is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness because in new technology usually the new generation provide us always better efficiency you know the engineered system what is the difference between 20 years or 30 years all the computer and the computer that you use today it is much more efficient it can perform much more tasks with the same power consumption for the same cost or even lower cost today's mobile phone for instance they are much more powerful than uh 30 years and 50 years older super computers so but let's just make clear what is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness in order to understand why technology are evolving this way not just through through our expectations if you took from the management science point of view uh i do appreciate the now it's become very classical the uh the definition uh that comes from great mind peter drucker from management science he wrote that efficiency is doing things right when effectiveness is doing the right things and what is the difference the doing right things it's not absolutely not the same as doing things right we will see the example but if you look just to the um emerging technology most of the emerging technologies they are struggling they they are always trying to improve efficiency in order to be competitive with existing technology so that's why we often very often we forgot about effectiveness when we are so much concentrated on the efficiency just to show you how it is uh serious okay let me see for instance the timeline of evolution of photovoltaic solution okay to generate electricity out of sun and you can see that on this diagram we see four big families four big technological families and the evolution within a time starting from 1975 up to now according to only one criteria what is a cell efficiency in a percentage and you can see how many different solutions they try to compete on the market and it is the highest efficiency for instance which uh you can see on this uh line it doesn't mean the the winner in this in this competition but this is what happens usually in engineering world i do appreciate i do like to share this diagram with you also in order to answer the question that i received from students of mine many times when i showed them that between invention and innovation we have a many years most of my students they said dmitry you are right but it was in the past today everything comes much faster we have a reduced time between invention and innovation because we are doing it right now more efficient but if you look just for instance for the photovoltaic which is still not main source of electricity on our markets even in very sunny countries it is still not the main source of electricity we can see that the transition from invention to innovation started years before 1975 because from 1975 those are rng programs which are invested heavily invested heavily supported by fundings in order to advance with the products and we can see that we already in this story more than about 40 years 40 years already done so uh i unfortunately with introductory course we have no time to discuss the time of from invention to innovation but what i'd like to keep you aware that this time even in modern ages does not shrink this time is decreasing and increasing and it depends on the cycles and economy because all technology whenever we take technology they serve some demand from economy but now i'd like to come back to the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and let's see this uh picture this diagram if you like when on the vertical x we put efficiency and when the horizontal x we put effectiveness if we are very high with efficiency if you are doing things right very fast very low cost very low energy expenses in this case we but we are not effective enough we just die quickly it is just very fast process that we perform but if the target is not adequate we are not surviving if we are very effective but we are not efficient enough we are always in a situation of surviving we we don't thrive in order to be successful in the market we have to be efficient and effective we need to do the right things and why it is not so easy to do the right things why we very often we are doing things that we believe that they are right but at the end we don't see so much customers or we don't see so much demand about technology or we don't see so much context before coming back to this subject i'd like to suggest for your attention and the very short video which uh supposed to help me to convey this idea what is the difference between efficiency and effectiveness well such a situation is quite rare in india at least in the most part of the country but we are very familiar with the morning when our cars especially in winter when our cars are heavily closed by snow but let's look together what happens yeah he's working hard and he is doing the best but finally yeah he was very efficient but not effective at all we can see a lot of examples of such a situation when we work hard we do the best to to keep our efficiency at the best level but at the end this is this is not the the thing that we have to do so in such a situation he was quite efficient but not effective at all another cartoon that i like a lot to share in order to to emphasize the difference between being efficient and being effective and this one the rabbits say okay we can we can go 100 times faster but the question is not to be faster if you are not effective the question is not how fast you are going in this direction if you are going in the wrong direction it doesn't matter how we are efficient there is a big question which usually we use technology for recast in order to to be effective if we can answer how do we know what is the right direction in a technological advancement we can be effective not only efficient how to be efficient we learned during our education since the beginning but how to be effective depends on your capacity to see the future what will be the relevant um technology to produce and to suggest from the market in order to meet expectation in order to satisfy the needs of society this is this is a question which helps us to be not only efficient but also effective thank you very much for this part of our lectures

2022-10-13

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