Technological Assessment for ICI Ltd
March 1st, 1980
Report for ICI Ltd.
S F Bush
Introduction
That the management of technological development is a key function in an industry or company is accepted by most if not all people, but what is meant by technology in any but very specific cases has proved very hard to pin down. The importance of reasonably widely agreed definitions and models is considerable, because without them we are unlikely to get the combination of consistency and far-seeing flexibility which can continue beyond the job-span of any particular individual.
This paper is a first attempt, among what has become quite voluminous literature on technological assessment, to develop definitions and models appropriate to the chemical and polymer industries. As noted in the summary, the underlying theme of the investigation to date has been to generate measures and definitions which can be accounted to some clearcut function within the organisation. It has seemed vital for future good technological decision-making including resource allocation that, as far as possible, measures of performance against which learning can be judged, should be free of distortions caused by factors beyond the technology’s control, in particular different rates of inflation in the basic resources used. This is not to say that the actual learning should not respond to changes in these factors; quite the reverse of course. But it is essential that our measures distinguish between learning responses to outside change and the outside changes themselves.
The paper is divided into two parts. In part one (sections 2 to 4), an interim overall measure of technological learning based on resource usage is proposed as a replacement for the BCG curve. In part two (sections 5 to 6), a chemical or polymer technology is defined as a set of stages, plus a set of boundary conditions which essentially embed the technological system inside the wider business system. Each of the five technological stages implies in principle a theoretical minimum resource usage, which thus links the overall measures of part one with the means of learning in part two.
An appendix gives a simple model of incremental learning on a plant which indicates the restrictive conditions under which a simple BCG surve could be expected to apply.