Technological Forecasting: A Prescription for the Military R&D Manager

Over the past 5 years, both Government and industry have become fascinated with the potential of technological forecasting as an aid in planning R&D budgets

Trends for Meetings and Expositions Industry

During the last decade, the meetings and expositions industry has flourished, even as it has struggled to cope with difficult challenges. This is a taste of things to me. In the years ahead, the global population will continue to grow and change, science and technology will tighten their hold on business and society and the world will knit itself ever more tightly into a single market. As a result, both opportunities and trials will abound

Club Medic

For most of us, getting sick is a good way to ruin a vacation. However, for growing numbers of people, needing to see the doctors the whole point of going abroad. When they require surgery or dental work, thy may combine treatment with a trip to the Taj Mahal, A photo safari on the African veldt, or a stay at a luxury hotel-or at a hospital that feels like one – all at bargain-basement prices. This is medical tourism, and it is one of the hottest niche markets in the hospitality industry

Probable tomorrows : how science and technology will transform our lives in the next twenty years

319 pagesA fascinating look at near-future advances, inventions, products, services, and everyday conveniences that will change how we live and work. Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies explore these changes and the impact they will have on everyday life. For example, by the year 2010: Personal computers will offer the power of today's supermachines and artificial intelligence. A telecommunications network will supply the world with services from the contents of the Library of Congress to pornographic videos in Cantonese. The United States - reversing a decades-old trend - will link its major cities with highspeed railroads. Airplanes will be capable of leaping halfway around the world in just two hours. Consumer goods will be produced at prices so low the poor of tomorrow could live as well as the rich of today. Scientists will have learned to purge the air of pollution, closing up the Antarctic ozone hole and ending the threat of global warming. Heavy industries can move into space, so that Earth can recover from our past environmental follies. Dramatic advances in gene mapping and organ transplants will extend the healthy human life span well beyond the century mark. Science and technology have dominated lifein developed countries since the Industrial Revolution. In the twenty-first century, they will change it almost beyond recognition. Probable Tomorrows tells us how

Technical resource management : quantitative methods

236 p., fig., ref. bib. : 13 p.1/2Traditional research management methods, the authors contend, are too unsystematic to continue to control the funding and allocation of men, money, and materials in research. Today, research and development (R&D) funds total $25 billion, of which federal funds account for 80%. If only because of researchers' responsibility for this cost, the authors say, "there must be a logical, rational way to select the tasks to be worked on and the resources to be expended on the effort." In fact, over the past decade a wide range of planning tools have been developed and tested; the authors believe they work; and this book gives an overview of the most significant resource allocation techniques now being used in government and industry. Among the suggested strategies for planning are rigorous goal identification, sample budgeting, time apportionment, and selection of those research paths which give the greatest over-all payoffs. The authors emphasize that hard choices must be made, and that research projects must be assigned a "value" rating so that the most promising ones are given priority, while less important ones are deferred. The allocation of funds represents one of the most difficult but also one of the most fruitful aspects of the decision-making process. One of the methods for making such decision is the Methodology for Allocating Corporate Resources to Objectives (MACRO) which has been used in Europe as well as in the U.S. Another procedure, now being employed by the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory, involves the use of computerized planning programs. Only research that has been carefully planned will yield the most significant technological advances. Yet development must be just as carefully managed, for its cost may be phenomenal, and a wrong start could be catastrophic. Finally, the authors consider technological forecasting, which must be accurate enough to provide the judgment necessary to prevent overextension of resources on the one hand, and incipient obsolescence on the other. Here, as in current planning, rigorous management control must be practiced