The Portland International Conference for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) has become a world-leading organization in the field of management of engineering and technology management (MET) since its inception in 1989. PICMET provides a strong platform for academics, industry professionals, and government representatives to exchange new knowledge in the field. To celebrate its 30-year journey, this article examines 20 conferences organized by PICMET covering 6601 accepted papers in order to show the trends in MET research and implementation through topics, authors, journals, and countries. In addition to the analysis of the PICMET data, the article delves into the past ten years (2009-2018) to carry out an in-depth bibliometric analysis of the citations of more than 3000 PICMET papers available at Scopus. The detailed analysis sheds light on how PICMET has developed a rich network of researchers and practitioners through its conferences over time. PICMET contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of the MET field and is also affected by the changes of the field. The article ends with key observations and a few suggestions for further studies.
The Portland International Centre for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) was established in 1989. It has since become one of the leading organizations in the field of management of engineering and technology in the world. PICMET provides a strong platform for academicians, industry professionals and government representatives to exchange new knowledge derived from both research and implementation of technology management. To celebrate its 30-year journey, and to show the trends in technology management research and implementation over the past ten years (2009-2018), this paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the more than 3000 papers accepted for inclusion in PICMET conferences. The study highlights the topics, authors, journals and countries where significant research on technology management is conducted.
The social and political perspectives are important considerations for renewable energy technologies. These perspectives may have impacts that are positive, negative, or a combination. Positive impacts can improve the adoption of certain technologies. Adverse impacts can reduce the intended benefits or even threaten the viability of a technologically promising technology. Since societal and political impacts are typically tightly inter-related they are being considered together. A literature review was performed to determine the criteria that are elements of the social and political perspectives. The literature review was supplemented with a review by experts to capture any additional criteria that were not specifically mentioned. The results are presented in this paper as taxonomy of criteria and sub-criteria for these perspectives. Over sixty criteria and sub-criteria are identified for the social and political perspectives. The perspectives and their criteria are important for decision making by policy makers, electric utilities, technology manufacturers, and research institutes. Having comprehensive sets of criteria can assist decision makers in ensuring that important aspects and impacts of the social and political perspectives are given due consideration and are not inadvertently omitted.
Research has shown that as the attractiveness of alternatives rises with more choices, individuals experience conflict between the alternatives, which causes them to defer their decision, search for new alternatives, or choose the default option. Having lesser attributes simplifies complex problems and the decision-making process. This chapter uses the sensitivity analysis in hierarchical decision model, developed by Hongyi Chen, to prove that we can reduce the size of a problem and make the decision easier with the future change of values of attributes, without affecting the final decision.
The objective of this research is to establish consistency thresholds linked to alpha (α) levels for HDM's (Hierarchical Decision Model) judgment quantification method. Measuring consistency in order to control it is a crucial and inseparable part of any AHP/HDM experiment. The researchers on the subject recommend establishing thresholds that are statistically based on hypothesis testing, and are linked to the number of decision variables and a level. Such thresholds provide the means with which to evaluate the soundness and validity of an AHP/HDM decision. The linkage of thresholds to a levels allows the decision makers to set an appropriate inconsistency tolerance compatible with the situation at hand. The measurements of judgments are unreliable in the absence of an inconsistency measure that includes acceptable limits. All of this is essential to the credibility of the entire decision making process and hence is extremely useful for practitioners and researchers alike. This research includes distribution fitting for the inconsistencies. The superb fits obtained give confidence that all the statistical inferences based on the fitted distributions accurately reflect the HDM's inconsistency measure.
A 3-level Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) 111 is established in this paper to help 18-30 year old college students make a decision of choosing a desirable digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) from 5 famous DSLR camera manufacturers. The HDM has been utilized in this paper, because it measures the relative contribution of each criterion to the final decision based on quantified judgments of the respondents. A group of experts, consists of 12 male and 9 female provided their quantified judgements with different weighted value in each element at each level of the decision hierarchy. By applying desirable functions, there was one most desirable camera picked from each manufacturer of the 5. Additionally. the research team also analyzed the judgments from experts for possible different judgements between gender groups, and showing no significant differences.
In this research, a technology policy choice framework is developed to link prospective high-tech areas, technology development strategies, and various innovative resources. The research approach is to develop a Hierarchical Decision Model. Experts are invited from diverse sources to provide a balanced perspective representing different stakeholders. This research focuses on the fast developing Chinese biopharmaceutical industry as a case study. The results of this research have identified thirteen biotech areas, four strategies, and eight types of innovation resources to achieve industrial competitiveness in the biopharmaceutical industry. The research outcomes serve as guidelines in resource allocation and policy making for technology development.
A new product is being developed by a multinational firm for personal asthma management that the patient can wear as an ambulatory device. This device will provide guidance and support for the prevention of exacerbations, the major cause of asthma attacks. However, introducing a device to the medical market is a long multistage and expensive process due to regulatory and reimbursement requirements. The firm desires to target initial niche markets for a subset of this product. This may be a better approach than bearing the high expense for the one time effort of only entering the medical market. Several initial niche markets appear attractive. These include: home care, asthma management, fitness/lifestyle, wellness, and hospital care. The question is, "Which one is more attractive?" By formulating this decision problem as a hierarchical decision model (HDM) with the different niche markets as the alternatives and selecting various levels of criteria we were able to address this question. An expert panel consisting of the firm׳s executive and operational management, subject matter experts, and external industry analysts was selected to obtain its collective judgments. The results representing the expert panel׳s judgment indicated that asthma management and home care markets were most attractive and the other three were given less relative importance. Intermediate results were also of interest, such as the relative importance of: market, financial, product, and corporate alignment objectives; regions within the market objectives; and decision elements that contributed to both financial and product objectives.
Selecting an appropriate portfolio of energy resources is a complicated and multidimensional problem. Affected by numerous factors stemming from multiple perspectives including technical, economic, environmental, social, and political, each energy resource has varying degrees of appropriateness for different regions/energy systems. Although there is significant amount of research attempting to incorporate different pieces of aforementioned considerations in an assessment framework very little has addressed this issue in a complete manner. This research study reviews assessment studies in the energy field and identifies over 50 assessment criteria that fall under aforementioned perspectives. Output of this study is expected to provide a knowledge database for practitioners and scholars for enabling development of more comprehensive assessment frameworks. Ultimately, this study is expected to contribute to energy planning field for development of more sustainable energy portfolios.
Healthcare is a very important issue in the U.S. and in the entire world and the total healthcare spending in the United States has increased over the years and by the end of 2021 it will reach up to 20% of the U.S. GDP. The increase of health expenditure, a growing U.S. population, and a projected physician shortage are the top three trends in healthcare industry. The literature highlights that researchers from different fields and with several interests recognize the important role of telemedicine in the healthcare industry. Teleconsultation is an advanced telemedicine application that offers great promise to address some of the challenges raised by these trends, and it is increasingly being included in discussions of medicine's future. Telemedicine faces many challenges in legislation and regulation, finance, technical, ethical and culture, but still the future is squarely on telemedicine. Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is integrated with Hierarchical Decision Model (HDM) to identify the best alternatives to help the diffusion of teleconsultation.
In all countries, some services are being provided and delivered through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Over the past decade, the use of electronic services (e-services) has proved to be efficient and effective in the private sectors providing much needed financial viability and business growth. Governments around the world have since joined the bandwagon, and empirical research provides evidence that countries that have mature electronic government (e-government) systems enjoy improved efficiency and effectiveness in the public service provision and delivery. There are many measurement instruments that measure a country's readiness for use of ICT or e-government, and these measurements are commonly used for comparative purposes at regional, international and global levels. The instruments measure the capacity of a country to use ICT in the provision and delivery of services. This paper reviews these instruments and explores literature on existing methodologies on determining a country's readiness to adopt and use information and communication technologies in public services. The objective of these reviews is to identify critical determinants of a country's electronic readiness (e-readiness).
Innovation is one of the most important sources of competitive advantage. It helps a company to fuel the growth of new products and services, sustain incumbents, create new markets, transform industries, and promote the global competitiveness of nations. Because of its importance, companies need to manage innovation. It is very important for a company to be able to measure its innovativeness because one cannot effectively manage without measurement. A good measurement model will help a company to understand its current capability and identify areas that need improvement.This paper develops a framework to determine the innovativeness of a company in semiconductor industry by using output indicators. Output indicators are used because they cannot be manipulated. A hierarchical decision model (HDM) was constructed for the framework. Expert judgments were quantified and incorporated into the model. The hierarchy consisted of three levels: innovativeness index, output indicators and sub-factors.According to the experts, the top three sub-factors to measure the innovativeness of a company are revenue from new products, market share of new products, and products that are new to the world.
............................................................................................................................ i DEDICATION .........................................................................................................................ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... iii LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES ................................................................................................................ xiii 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background ........................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Multiple Perspectives ........................................................................................... 3 1.3 Research Scope .................................................................................................... 4 2 LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................................... 8 2.1 Preamble .............................................................................................................. 8 2.2 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 9 2.3 Methodology ...................................................................................................... 11 2.4 Solar Photovoltaic Renewable Energy ............................................................... 13 2.5 Solar Photovoltaic Technologies ........................................................................ 16 2.5.1 Technology Assessment .............................................................................. 18 2.5.2 Deployment and Market Trends ................................................................. 21 2.6 Multiple Perspectives, Decision Making, and Technology Assessment ............. 23 2.7 Energy Multiple Perspectives: STEEP ................................................................. 25 2.8 Energy Decision Models ..................................................................................... 26