COMMERCIALISATION | CORNER
Te commercialisation of products derived from a single advanced technologies, such as semiconductors, MEMS and nanotechnology has leveraged the benefit of a single, if sometimes unique, technology manufacturing pathway. Even when the technology pathway required multiple technologies, such as optical switching, many thought that ‘the Physics’ of the optical switch was found in its MEMS elements. Te common technology roadmap method used was to apply first generation roadmapping strategies to the MEMS technology component. Tese simple first-generation roadmapping approaches were found, much to our dismay, inefficient. Te product development was not as simple as viewing a single technology. Many other technologies were required to fabricate the optical switch. When reviewing the complexity of the product and the system hierarchy of technologies involved, one quickly realises that collectively they required as much, if not more, technology development than our MEMS-based components did. Just roadmapping the MEMS elements was not enough. Many product development efforts of the 21st century are similarly constrained by this multi-dimensional technology architecture. Terefore these new products require more than one technology development path to be functional. Furthermore, their pathway for continual improvement over time requires improvements in more than one root technology. Indeed, an effective roadmap, one effective at when new innovations and technologies will be viable, will need to factor the progression of a technology set rather than any single technology out of that set. However, an integrated technology lifecycle approach for roadmaps was not present in either theory or practice.
First generation roadmapping efforts typically utilise a single path, examining a single technology life cycle at a given time point, to offer predictions and guide the development of future technology platorms. A well-known example is Moore’s Law found in the semiconductor industry, which examines and projects technology progression for future products development. Firms still use first-generation roadmapping to develop a baseline for product progression in time. Tis effort oſten occurs even when an industry has not established standard: production methods, unit cell designs or critical dimensions. When roadmapping is performed within a firm, the use of the firm’s standard manufacturing capabilities are used and applied to accelerate products along their chosen technology pathway.
Te second generation roadmapping efforts, developed by MANCEF, suggested that certain product components, such as accelerometers (found in cars, toys, mobile phones, medical equipment, watches and so much more), would become a dominating MEMS-based product and could be leveraged as the primary driver for a sector-based roadmap timeline. Tis works well until the complexity of multiple baseline or root technologies become the norm, then how can we generate a technique that would work with this new level of complexity?
A third generation of roadmap, being proposed by MANCEF, tackles the problem of progressing a set of technologies rather than setling on one technology. To begin the development MANCEF chose an industry that oſten utilises more than one technology to form the basis of its product development efforts — the pharmaceutical industry. Nowhere is there more convergence
of emerging and sustaining technologies to form the basis of product solutions than in the 21st century pharmaceutical industry. So how does this third-generation roadmap or, as it became known, ‘landscape’ provide the pharmaceutical industry, and other similarly complex industries, with a tool to guide their technology planning and product development pathways? An industry or firm would use it much in the same manner that they use other roadmapping techniques. It is a process based on the nature of the technologies used and the bounds and drivers of the industry that it assists. Pharmaceutical products commonly integrate a combination of somewhere between two and five emergent and sustaining technologies to form their 21st century product platorms. When atempting to apply first-generation roadmapping principles to assess five technologies, each with non-standard production methods, no common unit cell designs, or industry standard critical dimensions, its value is not clear. Another way to view this is that the effort required to develop these individual roadmaps could quickly outweigh its value. Te MANCEF pharmaceutical roadmapping team discussed the complexity and the need for roadmapping multi-dimensional technology architecture in numerous industries and realised that a new approach could be developed by embracing the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) concept developed by NASA.
Te TRL was developed by NASA in response to catastrophic product failures. Te intent of those that developed the concept of TRL’s was to assess the level of robustness of an end-product produced by any of a number of technologies. As it applies to third-generation roadmapping, the TRL concept provided us with a pathway to solve both the issue of technology integration as well as a pathway to investigate the progression of each individual technology for a given product paradigm over time. Te TRL concept utilises a level of technology readiness scale in a product that ranges from level 1 (the most commercially immature) through to level 9 (fully commercially developed). To apply this concept to the new roadmap MANCEF developed a pharmaceutical technology set readiness level by applying a TRL for each of the five most used technologies in pharmaceutical product development, as well as the technology set as a whole. Te MANCEF Pharmaceutical landscaping team found that in order to use TRL levels effectively it was important to incorporate an assessment process. It was decided that a modified version of the Technology Readiness Assessment (TRA) questionnaire (developed by the European Space Agency in 2008) would be effective for this purpose.
With the platorm for development of the pharmaceutical landscape set the MANCEF team developed and administered a TRA-based questionnaire to a large number of pharmaceutical product development professionals. Te TRL ratings for each technology category (Chemistry, Biology, MEMS, Nanotechnology and Computational Science) as well as the set as a whole were tabulated using two methods. Te first method was to take a simple average of all the raw scores in each category. Tis we defined as the Group Average. Te second method was to take the average score of all categories from each individual respondent and then find the mean, this is defined as the Set Average Method. It is of interest to note that the differences in set averages were negligible.
>> Continued on page 48 47 | commercial micro manufacturing international Vol 7 No.6
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52