Institute For The Future

Nine Technology Filters

For our next Tech Horizons exchange, Mike Love and I have been reviewing lots of our old technology forecasts and reports. I won't reveal some of the really "juicy" stuff we've been looking at (you will have to wait until the exchange) but one piece of work we came across caught my attention. In 1997, the team came up with 9 filters for evaluating new technologies and identifying technologies that are important to look at. These include:

 

 

1. The technology meets a need, desire, fear, or avoids a pain (think security technologies);

 

2. Psychological and social fit (i-mode phones being taken up by teenagers in Japan)

 

3. The technical sweetness of it (Doug Engelbart's full-screen text editing, the mouse, hypertext, etc.)

 

4. The tyranny of the installed base (QWERTY keyboard design)

 

5. Overcoming physical limits (Ethernet)

 

6. Technology capacity models (Moore's law)

 

7. Market-readiness models--represent the tastes, capabilities, and economics involved in forming markets for new technologies (Metcalfe's law--network technologies gain in utility as a function of the square of the number of users

 

8. The "right people" are involved (Apple's diaspora, Engelbart's alums, "Fairchildren")

 

9. Global social, economic, and cultural facts and trends, i.e. appropriateness of technology for worldwide adoption (video and audio cassettes, voice mail)

 

In 1997 the team talked about the need to continue to update and refine this toolkit. Any other filters anyone wants to suggest?