A novel approach for assessment of candidate technologies with respect to their innovation potentials: Quick innovation intelligence process

Technological innovationprocess startswith technical discovery of new things or newways of doing things, i.e., invention. With the commercialization of invention, the term, innovation, takes place instead of invention. The process ends with (duplicative and/or creative) imitation by competitors. It is expected that maximum profits can be achieved in the time interval from commercialization of invention to its imitation because of monopoly power. Therefore, assessing the emergence of invention in accordance with ability for commercialization and resistance for imitation can generate winning innovation intelligence. Besides, for achieving sustainability, disruptive technologies should also be taken into account through evaluation of trendiness of candidate technologies. This study presents a novel assessment process that aims to evaluate and prioritize candidate technologies according to their innovation potentials by considering commercialization, imitation and trendiness factors all together. According to authors’ best knowledge, the technology assessment process presented in this study is the first attempt in the literature that is dedicated to winning innovation intelligence and takes above mentioned factors together into account. Main input resources of the process are patents, scientific publications and market research reports. While trendiness of technologies is evaluated with the help of a fuzzy inference system that combines patent data and publicationdata, commercial and imitationpotentials are evaluatedwith thehelpof somemarketing indicators and determinants in the proposed assessment process. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.