Technological positioning is a central strategic objective of organizations to gain medium and long-term competitive advantages. Here the timely detection and prioritization of relevant “weak signals” arriving from basic or applied research, as well as emerging and disruptive technologies, can be of paramount importance. Often organizations are even paying constant attention and install special units and/or areas of expertise (e.g., technology scouts, road mapping, or foresight) to address the need for detection and interpretation of the environment.

The Business Unit Technology Management is devoted to the investigation, detection and analysis of signals, patterns, structures and systems of technological development, as well as matured technologies, which reveal conclusive and predictive hints about their genesis and evolution. The derived information and knowledge allows, in turn, uncovering new technological developments, leading scientists, and research institutions world-wide. Useful information and predictive data of our approaches are derived, for instance, from growing research interests towards a specific topic or discipline, media coverage or patent activities.

Our clients are organizations in basic industries and the service economy, universities and non-academic research institutions, as well as national, European, and international research agencies and service providers.

We employ methods for the retrieval of information from publicly available sources and databases, as well as for the advanced analysis of document-based structures, personnel networks and strategic alliances of organizations.  Our text-analytical tools process sources located on the world-wide web, from scientific databases, patent or project databases, and professional publications or general media. Excerpts are searched for keywords, semantically analyzed, grouped into content categories, and both hierarchically and relationally visualized. To this end, our Business Unit has developed and successfully applied the proprietary software BibTechMon™, which fully integrates text acquisition, key word searches, analysis, visualization, and graphically supported retrieval of all originally used document sources. In addition, work with our clients utilizes other methods such as scenario techniques, Delphi- and expert surveys, weak signal analyses, technology scouting, road mapping, technology portfolios, and so on and so forth.

Members of our Business Unit possess and complement expertise in various fields of the natural sciences, mathematics and philosophy, engineering and management sciences as well as organizational development.