Mankind has yet to invent a crystal ball capable of predicting the future. However, engineers at MIT have developed a pretty cool technique for forecasting technological change. Their formula predicts how fast a particular technology is advancing based on patent-related information.
The researchers succeeded in discovering the improvement rates of nearly 30 technologies, among them 3D printing and genome sequencing. They started off by scanning approximately 500,000 tech-related patents using a new method for selecting the ones that best suit each technology.
The team then analyzed specific metrics relevant to the patents and discovered that some, such as forward citations, are better predictors of a technology’s growth than others. This led the engineers to develop an equation based on a patent group’s average forward citation and publication date, which in turn allowed them to figure out the rate of improvement for the 28 technologies. The engineers say their method is significantly less laborious than more traditional forecasting techniques.
What do MIT engineers predict?
According to the researchers, the fastest-developing technologies include 3D printing, MRI technology and wireless communications. Meanwhile, batteries, wind turbines and combustion engines are improving at a slower pace. The team says its prediction tool could benefit a number of groups, including venture capitalists, governments and startup companies.
"There's a lot of nuance to our method, and I don't see it as something to hand out to the masses to play with," says Chris Benson, a former Department of Mechanical Engineering graduate student at MIT. "I see it more as something where we work with somebody to help them understand what the future technological capabilities that they're interested in are. We're probably more like a real estate agent, and less like Zillow."
Starting with Moore’s Law
Chris Magee, an engineering professor at MIT who collaborated with Benson, has been working on a forecasting method since 2003. Back then, he tried to figure out how the rate of technological improvement compared to Moore’s Law (the notion that a computer chip’s transistors double every two years).
"There were a lot of things that weren't going as fast as Moore's Law, and I started trying to get measures of them," the engineer shared.
He researched various metrics to determine which ones accurately represented productivity for the specific domains. Magee then used data from each metric (for example, the manufacturing speed) to figure out the overall improvement rate. Then in 2010, he decided to utilize the U.S. patent record as a resource.
Using the U.S. patent record
"We thought, 'Maybe there's enough information there that we can do something about linking it to the dynamism of technical change,'" the researcher says.
Magee and his team spent years going through thousands of patents, which proved to be a tedious task. In 2012, he created a better method for developing patent sets by examining the overlap between the U.S. patent record and international patenting systems.
"If a technology has more patents in general, it should be moving faster, but that turns out not to be the case," Benson explains. "3-D printing only has 300 to 500 patents, and that's improving at the same rate as semiconductors, which have about 150,000 patents. So there's almost zero correlation."
The team eventually developed its simple equation using the forward citation and publication date of patents. Benson and Magee hope their formula will one day be used as a rating system, in the vein of Standard & Poor's. A detailed account of their findings were published in the journal
PLoS ONE .Source: MIT News