Annual Meeting 2016 - Understanding & Leveraging Objective Technology Trends

Breakout Session

Technology forecasts are important to the allocation of investment capital and if accurate can be a bellwether for the disruptive innovation needed to fuel growth. Accordingly, anticipating how technologies will evolve is a requisite skill of a high functioning R&D organization. Understanding technology trends are critical for choosing among initiatives competing for internal funding, supporting effective due diligence on potential acquisition candidates, or opening up new and non-obvious innovation directions. Yet, too often, technology forecasting relies on forms of guess work that are inadequate for strategic investment decision-making. Given its criticality, why do so many companies today still struggle to identify and leverage important technology trends?

GEN3 Partners present a practical approach for considering technology trends and, importantly, how to transport them across industry borders. A fundamental tenet of this framework is a practically proven belief that engineering systems evolve over time in a direction of increasing value. Further, the market forces that demand increasing value can be viewed through a set of objective trends that drive system development. Participants are encouraged to actively apply these trends to their own products and systems and presenters provide examples across industries.