Forecasting for strengthening technological development

Abstract

Producing technological innovation is currently one of the key items in being more competitive. However, production sectors are facing great challenges, including analysing a large amount of available technological and market information regarding the environment for strategic decision-making and being able to launch themselves onto the market with technological developments bringing the desired economic returns. Several tools for analysing information have emerged for reducing the uncertainty of technological and market changes. This article provides conceptual and reflective elements so that forecasting strengthens technological development (TD). Forecasting is initially proposed as being one of the future methods of analysis having a significant impact on decision-making, mainly within the field of economics but which could be extrapolated to making a contribution to TD. The techniques which have been the recent instrument for collecting information for producing forecasting are described, as is work about the concept of surveillance/monitoring and the processes used for coordinating such approaches. It can thus be stated that they provide an excellent basis for strengthening TD by providing platforms for new or improved developments in processes or products. Reflection about these aspects provides perspectives for implementing technological forecasting (TF) in production systems so that they obtain efficient and concrete results via deterministic methods as input in decision-making in technology regarding its middle and long-term competitiveness.