Decision-Making for New Technology: A Multi-Actor, Multi-Objective Method

Technology managers increasingly face problems of group decision. The scale and complexity of research, development and alliance efforts in emerging fields of technology mandate a correspondingly sophisticated form of group coordination. Information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology are good examples of sectors with complex coordination problems. Choices made include the selection of projects, the choice of investment alternatives, and the formation of technology licensing agreements. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods are often used to help decision makers in such situations. A shortcoming of these methods is that the step from individual preferences to a collective preference is merely an aggregation. This aggregation of preferences requires the group of decision makers to agree on a collective preference. This paper presents a method that does not aggregate the individuals' preferences but instead considers strategic and economic factors in the assessment. We use an exchange coordination hypothesis, drawn from the theories of Coleman and other researchers, to support our model. The advantage of this method is that the results provide an improved prescription for strategy, given the constraints of preferences and existing alliance structures. The model is motivated based upon the needs of technology managers in new, converging fields of technology. The model is formally analyzed using operations research techniques. We then apply the model to a representative technology management problem in the converging fields of informatics, bio and nanotechnology.