Complex Technology Assessment as a Determinant for Marketing Activities in Innovation Commercialisation

Innovations have become the cornerstone of today's knowledge-based economies. At the micro level, they are a priority for most businesses and an organisational imperative for their successful running, because they improve production processes, reduce manufacture costs, and as a result increase quality of goods, bring higher customer satisfaction, and generate more profits. At the macro level, innovations are critical to the success of industry and a key factor when deciding upon the competitiveness of the entire economy. Before an innovation is successfully implemented in practice, it ought to undergo an in-depth evaluation procedure to prove whether it is marketable and profitable. The decision to commercialise any new technology should, therefore, be based on sound information about its commercialisation opportunity. For that reason, factors critical in determining the commercial success of innovations need to be identified, and assessed, so that appropriate marketing activities, facilitating successful innovation commercialisation, can be undertaken. Information about innovation's commercialisation opportunity can be obtained when three aspects of a technology are thoroughly analysed, which include its implementation maturity, commercial potential and the level of innovativeness. Only then strategic decisions can be made concerning the type of marketing strategies that need to be applied in order for the innovation to be successfully brought to the market. The authors point out that additional factors also need to be taken into account both when interpreting the outcomes of a complex technology assessment and when deciding on the type of marketing activities to be undertaken. These factors include the type of innovation (unit or mass production) and its character (radical or incremental). The focal point of the article is the dependency between different types and characters of innovations, the outcomes of their complex assessment, and the type of marketing activities to be undertaken in order for the product to be successfully diffused into the market. The authors present 16 possible cases of the aforementioned dependencies and, by presenting some examples of marketing activities undertaken with reference to actual innovations, translate them into practice. The presented examples refer to technological solutions developed at the Institute for Sustainable Technologies - National Research Institute (ITeE-PIB) in Radom, Poland, which, before being transferred to industry, were subject to an integrated assessment with the use of the Complex Technology Assessment System also designed at the Institute.