TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE PROCESS IN TECHNOPARK FIRMS: AN EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN TURKEY

Abstract

The new age is characterized by a knowledge based economy and rapid technological changes. In this complex environment, technology intelligence (TI) and forecasting the future technologies are important for being proactive against the rapid technological changes and generating new innovations. TI is a vital process to sustain the firm`s competitiveness. This paper examines the technology intelligence process in scope of Turkish technopark firms. The empirical data was obtained from 136 technopark firms and evaluated by the context of TI model synthesized by the researchers based on the literature. According to the results it is determined that, TI mechanisms of the technopark firms are unstructured and technopark firm’s don’t allocate enough resources for TI, they use the environments that can be easily reached such as internet and periodical magazines, and analyze the data about technology by using heuristic methods mostly. This could be related to characteristics of the technopark firms such as being micro size and owner-manager, insufficient personnel and financial sources etc. Because in developing countries like Turkey most of the firms are SMEs, a further research might be useful to develop a specialized TI model for SMEs

Keywords

• Technology Intelligence, Technology Watch, Technology Scanning

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