Evaluation of Commercial Potential of a New Technology at the Early Stage of Development with Fuzzy Logic

Commercial potential is the opportunity of commercialization of the candidate technology. Every new technology to reach market needs to thrive and prosper in a continuously changing and unpredictable business environment. Determination of commercial potential of a technology is a necessary prerequisite element for defining successful commercialization strategies. Commercial potential can be determined by various methods. The focus of this paper is on developing of a Fuzzy system for measuring commercial potential of a candidate technology at the early stage of development before spend the time and effort, based on Strategic Technology Evaluation Program (STEP). Based on STEP, for commercialization, every new technology needs a number of characteristics; these characteristics are broken into some dimensions and this dimensions to some indices. For measurement of commercial potential we use “IF {Fuzzy antecedents} THEN {Fuzzy consequent}” rule. This system uses experts’ knowledge and includes implementation of Fuzzy logic method and terminology. The approach that is described here is simply a framework, which can be modified to fit different situations as appropriate. Keyword: Commercial Potential, Commercialization, Model, Measurement, Fuzzy Logic, early stage technology, technology development project evaluation, probability of commercialization ∗ PH.D Student of Operation and Production Management of Tehran University, Academic Staff and Partnership Evaluation Director of RIPI, Business Development Department, Research Institute of Petroleum Industry, Tehran, Iran. Corresponding author: [email protected] ISSN: 0718-2724. (http://www.jotmi.org) JOURNAL OF TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT & INNOVATION © JOTMI Research Group 73 J. Technol. Manag. Innov. 2007, Volume 2, Issue 4