Measuring Commercial Potential of Technology with Fuzzy Logic

Commercial potential is the possibility of commercialization of candidate technology. Every new technology to reach market needs to thrive and prosper in a continuously changing and unpredictable business environment. Determination of commercial potential of a technology is a necessary prerequisite element for defining successful commercialization strategies. There are numerous methodologies for making such a determination. The focus of this paper is on the development of a fuzzy system to measure commercial potential of candidate technology for development at the early stage of development and before expend the time and effort, based on Strategic Technology Evaluation Program (STEP). Based on STEP, for commercialization, every new technology needs a number of characteristics; these characteristics are broken into some dimensions and finally the resulting dimensions in to some indices. For measuring commercial potential, we used “IF {Fuzzy antecedents} THEN {Fuzzy consequent}” rules. This system uses expert knowledge and includes implementation of fuzzy logic methods and terminology.