A Cross-Impact Analysis-Based Technology Foresight Method And Its Application

As human society develops gradually, technology will play a much more important role in its economic and social development process. However, because of the impacts from internal and external complex factors, the uncertainties in technologies'development process grow rapidly. Therefore, scientific and reasonable technology foresight activities have caught broad attention from governmental departments and R&D institutions. Cross-Impact Analysis(CIA) is brought forwards by the American researcher T.J. Gordon in 1968. It is a useful technology foresight method that will consider mutual relationships between events thoroughly. In order to understand the analytical process of CIA and its latest development, and to direct the technology foresight activities based on CIA, the following three aspects of work have been carried out in this paper.First, systematically study the analytical models of CIA and its latest development. It is found that three analytical models have been formed in the development process of CIA, which are CIA for forecasting events'happening probabilities, CIA for forecasting events'developing trends and CIA for selecting key events. As the requirement of technology foresight becomes stricter, some scholars make continuous improvements to CIA based on these three basic analytical models. The improvements mainly focus on the integration of CIA with other technology foresight methods, the consideration of other factors (such as: time) during the process of CIA and the use of fuzzy numbers to predict the future. In this paper, three typical new CIA models which are improved by both foreign and domestic scholars are selected to make particular introductions.Second, bring forwards the CIA-based technology foresight model. In order to make better applications of CIA, we combine the CIA-based technology foresight model with the Instant Messaging technology-based Group Decision Support System (GDSS). Instant Messaging technology-based GDSS can effectively solve the problem that experts are in different areas and have different time arrangements. Through this system, experts can obtain relevant information of a certain kind of technology, and then make judgments or estimations for its future development. Meanwhile, in order to obtain consistent views of experts, two other technology foresight methods, Brain Storm and Delphi, are also introduced into the foresight process. The real-time discussion function of Instant Messaging technology-based GDSS can realize the Brain Storm process, and a number of timely feedbacks of experts' opinions can realize the Delphi process. In the end, make a simple application of CIA-based technology foresight model. In order to better grasp the prospects for the development of ETC in Beijing, we attempt to make a simple prediction of this technology in accordance with the process of the CIA-based technology foresight model. We use the Group function of Tencent QQ as a simple Instant Messaging technology-based GDSS. Under the direction of Brain Storm and Delphi, we obtained the consistent judgments and estimations from experts. Finally, the process of CIA for forecasting events' happening probabilities is programmed to calculate those initial data. A good foresight result is found.