Early warning system frameworks for predicting technological change

Technology management has been an increasingly important research area with the uninterrupted rapid changes in the technology. In this respect, ?technology watching?, as being one of the fundamental functions of technology management, has also been essential for all organizations to select, implement or develop technologies that best suit their business needs. As a consequence, demand for technology watching methodologies has increased and many novel methodologies have been introduced in the literature. In most of these methodologies, subjective expert opinions constituted the base for forecasts and evaluations. Hence, they have been incapable to detect meaningful and critical relations within the huge technological and scientific data. Even more, some of these methodologies failed to produce outputs that are formerly highlighting unpredictable changes. Thereby, objective of this thesis has been presenting analytical frameworks that are providing roadmaps for predicting emerging technologies and their impacts at the earliest convenience.The thesis covers four proposed frameworks that can be summarized as follows: The first framework is on an extended version of previously developed ?Patent Alert System? (PAS) which is an early warning system for technology watchers. Patent counts are retrieved from the publicized databases and subsequently a recently developed fuzzy-based alert triggering mechanism is used to search for trend changes within the associated data. In the second framework, technologies are attempted to be classified via density of patenting activities. Significant clusters, that are minimizing the heterogeneity of members, are searched via Grand Deluge Algorithm (GDA) from numerous alternatives. The third one presents an extension of a well-known forecasting method: ?Technology Forecasting using Data Envelopment Analysis? (TFDEA) to produce forecasts with smaller bias. The last framework employs belief triangles and ?Rogersian Characteristics of Innovation Perception? for measuring the level of perceived innovativeness for a certain product. All of the proposed frameworks described above are all accompanied with real cases for verification and demonstration purposes.It is well worth pointing out that, the frameworks proposed and exemplified through this thesis are expected to provide practical and useful solutions for technology watching activities.