Master Thesis

Overview:

Technology push represents an important resource for disruptive innovations that can bring about change from a society-wide level. This innovation approach can be characterised as a process triggered by internal or external research, with the objective to commercialise the use of new know-how or specific new technology. The approach is based on the assumption that "more R&D in" results in "more successful new products out" [Rothwell, (1994), p.8]. The description of this phenomenon from Berkhout et al. (2010, p.481) is often reflected in the view of many companies: "If we invest enough in science and technology, the rest will work out right".

To date, however, the topic has been insufficiently addressed in the literature, and there is a lack of validated methods to deal with the high level of ambiguity and uncertainty in technology push innovations. In particular, there is hardly any research in the area of application identification for new or existing technologies, although there is a high demand for technology transfer.

The TAS framework developed at KIT addresses this gap and offers a practical framework for moderation to support technology push innovations. In order to identify and validate the requirements and criteria for such a framework, the Institute for Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation Management (EnTechnon) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is researching in this area.

Objective:

The goal of this thesis is to identify the requirements of an application identification/ selection framework for Technology Push Innovations (according to Johannesson and Perjons
2014, pp. 13-14).

Process:

1. outlining the relevance

• Why is Application Selection in Tech Push Innovations crucial?

2. investigating the main research question

• What are the requirements of an effective Application-Identification Framework for Technology Push Innovations?

To investigate this question, three research activities need to be conducted:

Literature Review:

• What is the state of art with respect to Application identification/ selection processes and methods?
• Which processes/ frameworks are used by now and why are the current approaches not effective?
• Which purposes for the usage are mentioned in the literature?
• Which quality criteria are mentioned in the literature?
• Are there approaches specifically relevant for technology transfer/ researchers?

Expert Interviews:

• to gather qualitiative insights supplementing the Literature Review

Application Identification/ Selection Frameworks:

• What is the purpose of the existing frameworks?
• How do these frameworks work and for whom are they designed?
• What are the requirements of the existing frameworks?
• Which problems do users face, when using the frameworks?
• What are challenges in the process?

For gathering a deep understanding of the state of the art regarding the requirements, the results of the three research activities need to be analyzed and summarized into a list of requirements and challenges need to be highlighted.

This list needs to be applied to the existing frameworks to figure out, which of the frameworks contributes to which extent to the main goal of the application identification/ selection process.

Results:

The results of the thesis will be a broad and structured overview about challenges in application identification selection in the technology push innovation process. Furthermore, the functional requirements for the application identification selection framework will be outlined. In addition, structured and environmental requirements are expanded.

Type: Masterthesis

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Orestis Terzidis

Person in Charge: Sarah Manthey, PhD Candidate

Literature:

• Aslani, A., H. Eftekhari, M. Hamidi, and B. Nabavi. 2015. commercialization Methods of a New Product/Service in ICT Industry: Case of a Science & Technology Park. Organizacija 48 (2): 131-138.
• Danneels, E. and Frattini, F. (2018). Finding applications for technologies beyond the core business. MIT Sloan Management Review, 59(3):73-78.
• Jolly, V. K. (1997). Commercializing new technologies: getting from mind to market. Harvard Business Press.
• Souder, W. E. (1989). Improving productivity through technology push. Research-Technology Management, 32(2):19-24.
• Terzidis, O. and Vogel, L. (2018). A unified model of the technology push process and its application in a workshop setting. In Technology Entrepreneurship: 111-135. Springer.