توسعه مدل ارزیابی محصول فن آوری جدید برای ارزیابی فرصت های تجاری سازی با استفاده از روش دلفی و رویکرد تحلیل سلسله مراتبی فازی

As the number of new products developed by new technologies has increased, the importance of the commercialization of new technology products has become crucial to manufactures in the successful delivery of valuable new products and services. This study classified success factors for commercialization of new products and analyzed which factors should be primarily considered. Based on the literature review and Delphi method, we identified four decision areas and further prioritized the sixteen factors under a hierarchy model structured by fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) approach. The FAHP is conducted by 111 R&D and business experts working at the world’s major players in machinery industry; using the priorities of success factors derived by FAHP, we devise an example of commercialization assessment model. The paper drives the assessment initiatives of the new product development in manufactures and provides them with practical implications about the commercialization of new technology product.

As technologies change rapidly, most companies experiencing successful growth are facing pressure for the development of new technology products. Previous studies have reported that new products produced by new technologies have resulted in a 40% to 90% increase in national wealth in most countries (Campbell, 1983 and Lee et al., 2009). Many companies are aware of the strategic importance of technology commercialization and have been trying to develop innovative technology products. For successful new product development (NPD), technology is the one of the most commonly cited success factors (Atuahene-Gima, 1996 and Bastic, 2004). Balachandra and Friar (1997) analyzed the success factors of NPD, and found that the firms’ technological resources influence the success of NPD. However, new technologies are often initially targeted to the wrong market for commercialization. The most challenging problem facing firms is how the new product or technology successfully commercialized given a high level of market uncertainty. Most studies have emphasized the significant role of the market research, which includes market, customer, and competitor analysis in stimulating the need for a new product (Gatignon and Xuereb, 1997, Jaworski and Kohli, 1993 and Ruekert, 1992). These studies have asserted that company need to adopt a market-oriented perspective in delivering valuable new products. Moreover, in the case of machinery products (specialized defense and industrial products such as shipbuilding, plant construction, and steel), such industrial product development projects are extremely expensive and risky as the products are manufactured in a small quantity in response to a specific technological request from a customer. As only the customized technology turns out to be of extraordinary value in the specialized industrial products, the development of machinery products should be the result of a proactive R&D of technology that takes into account the demands and preferences of an industrial customer beforehand. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate the assessment of commercial opportunity before new product development projects are launched. The new technology product development process requires an integrated framework to be put into place to ensure that the firms’ technological resources are aligned with market and customers’ needs. Furthermore, firms’ technology capabilities should be considered in the new technology product development decision-making process in order to know how to accomplish the desired result in their product, by identifying market and customers’ needs. Previous studies have focused on the general market or business factors for successful new product development, but we expand these factors and develop a new technology product assessment model that incorporates the commercialization opportunity and the technology capability factors simultaneously. This research prioritizes the factors that should be considered for new technology product development from multiple dimensions based on market opportunity and the technology resource-based approach for the preliminary assessment before launching an NPD project. From this, we identify commercialization evaluating factors for the development of the new products and examine what factors should be primarily considered. Based on the literature review and Delphi study with expert members from the machinery industry, four decision areas are identified: marketability, business feasibility, technological competitiveness, and R&D capabilities. We then prioritize the sixteen factors under a hierarchy model which is identified by the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach. The identification and prioritization of factors for commercialization of new technology products presented in this paper improve the conventional technology valuation model and will provide new insights for the experts of technology planning, R&D, and strategy department of companies. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the relevant literature. Section 3 describes the proposed research framework and the research method. Section 4 presents the results, and fifth section shows the application of case study. Finally, the last section concludes the paper.

The main contribution of this paper was to identify the list of criteria and factors for assessing the commercialization opportunity for new technology products. We also developed the assessment scoring checklist model for manufactures. The paper elaborated upon a technology hierarchy assessment model and identified important criteria and their weights to evaluate the relative importance of the factors crucial for the commercialization of technology. Our paper contributes to extant literature on technology valuation by applying the fuzzy AHP model with the in-depth Delphi method, which is considered one of the most structured techniques for industrial and managerial decision making. Based on the literature review and Delphi study, an AHP model was generated by incorporating four categories of decision criteria. We realized that it is essential to embrace the market opportunity and technology resource of new products accordingly in order to make well-founded decisions before or after the NPD projects are launched. In addition, we used the fuzzy approach to make the conventional AHP model more sophisticated with sharper definitions of decision criteria and factors suggested by it. The results of the FAHP method indicated that marketability is predominant criterion for the commercialization of technology products. In particular, market potential, customer needs, profitability, and market competition factors seem to have distinctively higher importance, indicating that they are the key factors for commercializing technology for new products. This result provides evidence that new technology-based product development should be targeted at the right market opportunity. We further adopted several technological factors for evaluating new technology and found that technological competitiveness factors and R&D capabilities factors are also significant in commercializing new technology. In addition, based on the factors’ weights that we derived, the study developed a scoring checklist model to provide practitioners with the critical decision criteria and the scoring guide for new technology product commercialization. Technologies used in the new products are neither existent nor proven at the start of an NPD project, and it is difficult to apply technological advancements to product features and benefits. Therefore, technology and commercialization feasibility integrated assessment framework is required for ensuring that firms’ technological resources are aligned with the market’s and customers’ needs. This paper provides implications for both scholars and practitioners. For academic scholars, the study attempted to extend the work for NPD research field. Previous NPD studies have investigated only the general business factors of NPD. However, we identify and prioritize these factors in greater detail by extending them into more informative technology and marketability elements. For practical purpose, this study can offer a practical guide for using evaluation criteria in the commercialization of technology products with an example of an assessment model. However, this research has its limitations due to the fact that the study was based on a selected group of Korean industrial machinery companies’ practitioners and experts. These respondents might not represent other industries, such as high-tech industry or the IT manufacturing industry. In future studies, extended research is needed to investigate the applicability of the assessment model developed in this paper into a variety of different areas in machinery manufacturing beyond machinery product development. Researchers also need to validate the criteria for machinery manufacturers using a broader set of interviews with technology experts from diverse backgrounds, including small and medium-sized companies and venture firms. Another survey method apart from a Delphi study needs to be considered as an interview tool to be incorporated into fuzzy AHP.