Cost-Effective Allocation of Research Funds for Emerging Technologies

Abstract

Developers of emerging technologies, and the agencies who fund them, need an alternative to traditional cost-based risk prediction methods to help them predict how the costs of their technologies might change under future deployment scenarios. Often the only data available for predicting risk are the limited but complex data generated by field testing emerging technologies in the prototype phase of development. This paper presents a conceptual framework for evaluating cost and performance constraints of emerging technologies; the framework can be used to prioritize the allocation of research and development funds for the development of such technologies.