Characterising a technology development at the stage of early emerging applications: nanomaterial-enhanced biosensors

Abstract

We devise future-oriented technology analyses tools to investigate a technology at an interesting development stage of early emerging applications. At this stage, technologies show great potential with little established commercialisation. Future development pathways are highly uncertain and heavily dependent on contextual interactions. We apply R&D profiling, R&D-to-applications cross-charting, and technology delivery system modelling to help understand the phenomena that bear upon development prospects. We develop our approach through a two-tier case study: general treatment of nanomaterial-enhanced biosensors, followed by more specialised treatment of one subset of those. Results convey the importance of considering technological and social context factors together to understand likely innovation pathways.

Keywords:

• emerging application
• nanomaterial-enhanced biosensor
• future-oriented technology analyses (FTA)
• technology delivery system (TDS)
• nanotechnology
• nanoparticle

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Larry Bottomley, Oliver Bran, Jiri Janata, Jan Youtie and Margaret Kosal for their guidance – also helpful e-mail inputs from others. This research at Georgia Tech drew on support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (Arizona State University; Award No. 0531194); and the Science of Science Policy Program – ‘Measuring and Tracking Research Knowledge Integration’ (Georgia Tech; Award #0830207). The findings and observations contained in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF.

VantagePoint text mining software facilitated the data analyses and visualisations [www.theVantagePoint.com]; Pajek software [http://vlado.fmf.unilj.si/pub/networks/pajek/] is key in generating Figure 6.