Forecasting and Management of Technology, Second Edition

9.7 Conclusion

One might consider the innovation process to be threefold: figure out what can happen, make good things happen, and make the consequences as positive as possible. Forecasting and impact assessment should play major roles in this process. Impact assessment, even if it is a quick and dirty process, is important to learn the possible outcomes, especially those that are not obvious, indirect, or delayed. This knowledge is extremely important in managing technology development and use.

In forecasting, identification is the most important component of impact assessment. The forecaster must go beyond the obvious and expected impacts to consider those that are unanticipated and unintended. As has been suggested, impact analysis often can be done without overwhelming detail and precision. In many cases, simply sorting impacts according to significance and likelihood will prove sufficient.

Impact evaluation foreshadows management decisions in the development and utilization processes. It determines the relevance of impacts to the values and goals of the developer, stakeholders, and society. Thus, it opens the way to sound decision making.

This chapter ends with the mention of sustainability, an extraordinarily important area that has not been mentioned thus far. Practicing sustainability requires that the world's inhabitants adopt lifestyles that neither deplete the resources on which they depend nor destroy the people living on the planet. Governments and corporations as ...