Historically, Technology Assessment (TA) refers to studying the societal effects of the development and application of a technology. A key challenge for modern TA is to assess emerging technology fields as they are emerging – this is crucial for producing actionable strategic intelligence for use in decision-making. To contribute to addressing this challenge, the aim of this research is to advance methods to generate effective technology assessment intelligence, and to showcase the approach with an application to the rapidly evolving field of “Big Data.” The key contributions of this paper are twofold: 1) Methodological: To advance the Forecasting Innovation Pathway (FIP) methodology to identify potential impacts of an emerging technology, and to gauge their likelihood and magnitude of importance for further study; 2) Substantive: To estimate the likelihood and importance of potential impacts of big data analytics (BDA) more broadly, and to help inform U.S. policy considerations in particular.
Author(s): Ying Guo, Jianhua Liu, Alan L. Porter
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: Annual Conference on Big Data and Business Analytics (Shanghai, China)
Year: 2017