Showing papers in "Technological Forecasting and Social Change in 1991"

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the Delphi technique to determine whether it succeeds in alleviating the "process loss" typical of interacting groups, and conclude that inadequacies in the nature of feedback typically supplied in applications of Delphi tend to ensure that any small gains in the resolution of process loss are offset by the removal of any opportunity for group "process gain".

TL;DR: The literature concerning quantitative applications of the Delphi method is reviewed in this paper, and no evidence was found to support the view that Delphi is more accurate than other judgment methods or that consensus in a Delphic is achieved by dissemination of information to all participants.

TL;DR: A variation on the conventional Delphi was used to assemble an informational summary of expert opinion regarding the risks involved with the application of sewage sludge to farmland to reduce uncertainties surrounding the associated health and environmental risks so agreement among citizens, farmers, and regulators could be reached.

TL;DR: The characteristic S-shaped diffusion pattern and the resulting rates of diffusion are a macroaggregate of an underlying complexity of adoption causes, and diffusion phenomena are probably best conceptualized as proceeding through various stages of a diffusion life cycle.

TL;DR: This paper found that, prior to 1800, democratic development was experimental in character, but it has been growing fairly rapidly since the middle of the 19th century, generally fitting quite closely the model of diffusion.

TL;DR: Innovation diffusion occupies a special place in the economics of technological change as mentioned in this paper, and it is empirically the best established and most intensively studied phenomenon in this area, and the logistic and other S-shaped curves have provided a sound mathematical, if somewhat phenomenological, inroad into a diverse range of applications.

TL;DR: In this article, a multivariate logistic regression model was used to evaluate the effect of different barriers to adoption of a particular process innovation, namely programmable automation (PA) machine tools.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on an environment in which customers and producers interact where society is deeply and diversely interconnected; computer and information technology is widespread, accepted, and greatly used; and consumer needs become increasingly ill-structured, so that consumers have only a vague perception of the product they need.

TL;DR: A technology forecasting approach based on a semi-Markov model, which appropriately describes the probabilistic nature of a sequential technology development process, is suggested, and a simulation technique is developed to forecast the development process by utilizing the information on such interrelationships.

TL;DR: In this paper, the manufacturing strategy model developed by Hill is extended to encompass the factors important to the strategic decisions of international transfer of technology, including the purpose and mode of the transfer as well as the environmental conditions of the recipient country.

TL;DR: It is speculated that the new generation of massively parallel supercomputers will replace the currently accepted von Neumann architecture for supercomputing, although the ascendant dominant architecture cannot yet be spelled out in detail.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate that the diffusion of pervasive systems worldwide tends to cluster toward the saturation period and that the time span between the start of diffusion in leading and lagging countries decreases as the diffusion progresses.

TL;DR: In recent years, the pace of material substitution has quickened and many new materials have been introduced, and old ones improved as mentioned in this paper, which has pushed back the cost-increasing effects of resource depletion while expanding man's horizon of opportunities.

TL;DR: The last two decades have seen a remarkable growth in the number of cooperative agreements among large, multinational enterprises (MNE) as mentioned in this paper Why, and under what conditions, would these vertically and horizontally integrated organizations choose to give up a part of what has often been cited as their main raison d'etre, in favor of sharing such information with rivals?

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors study various types of contingent product relationships and develop propositions to specify pricing strategy for primary and contingent products, and provide guidelines for developing pricing strategies for primary products and challenges some beliefs regarding the relative contribution of the primary and the contingent products to the overall profitability of the product mix.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors develop an empirical model for foresight studies as a tool in strategic decision-making and demonstrate how several stakeholders in a nation can be mobilized to assess emerging technologies, develop a common field of reference in judging these technologies, and coordinate the joint actions of the actors in this field.

TL;DR: The paper's synthesis of the literature is based on a heuristic multi-process equilibrium model of the adoption decision and proposes numerical simulation as an avenue to escape the related problems of tractability and identification.

TL;DR: In recent years, a wide variety of different terms have come into being: technological innovation, spatial dynamics, economic restructuring, industrial rejuvenation, urban incubation, and many others as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: Workers often express a great deal of concern over managerial policies and tactics in introducing technological change as mentioned in this paper, and many of these concerns arise from misunderstandings and miscommunications of managerial policies.

TL;DR: In this article, several models are proposed to understand how organizations prepare for, manage, and recover from crisis situations, and it is shown that these multiple perspective models are necessary to understand the complex behavior of organizations during crises; they also appear to have a predictive capability.

TL;DR: The human factors and ergonomics approaches illustrate many of the difficulties associated with large technology-based systems in general and suggest the inadequacy of existing approaches and the fundamental need for paradigm shift.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the beginning steps taken toward this end, overcoming the inertia of "groupthink", stimulating greater openness to new ways of thinking and acting, and preparing managers to deal with "surprises" as a way of life, as well as producing a new and resilient R&D strategy.

TL;DR: Using the Green Revolution in Indian agriculture as the empirical basis, it is argued that the technological change inherent in the green revolution could be best understood as a problem-solving activity as mentioned in this paper.

TL;DR: The International Conference on Diffusion of Technologies and Social Behavior, summarized in this article, organized under the following headings: empirical regularities; theoretical issues; predictability; roles of time and space; definition of niche and innovation; selection dynamics; role of marketing; social aspects of diffusion; globalization of diffusion processes; and applications of diffusion.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the degree of success of the ERC program as perceived by a sample group of industrial and manufacturing engineers across the country, focusing on individuals and industries located within major industrial areas and ERC locations.

TL;DR: In this article, it is shown that a short segment of a chaotic sequence can be used to reconstruct large portions of a sequence and to forecast future values of the sequence over short ranges, while the accuracy of the forecasts is dependent on the precision of the data.