Value of Innovation as a metric to drive technology development
Abstract
Innovation characterizes industrial, economic, and societal development. Within the domain of the built environment, technological advancements are continuously pursued to enhance structural safety, functionality, and cost efficiency. At the same time, the challenges associated with ageing infrastructure and constrained resources necessitate the systematic development and effective diffusion of technologies, including those related to information systems, intervention strategies, and maintenance management. The basic idea of this article is that principles from decision value analysis (DVA), innovation theories, and technology readiness levels can be used to guide the development and diffusion of built environment technologies. From this perspective, this article presents a decision analysis framework to drive technology innovation by forecasting the benefits that a new technology generates in specific utilization scenarios. The Value of Innovation (VoIn) is formalized, building upon a reinterpretation of the predicted value of information, predicted value of actions, and the predicted value of information and action from an innovation perspective. The VoIn may provide guidance in the development of a new technology, for example, to select its performance characteristics and operating modes, and also in its commercialization by integrating in the decision value quantification innovation attributes such as relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, observability, and trialability. Three levels of decision value quantifications, namely, concept-, experiment-, and operation-based decision value quantifications, are introduced for alignment of technology readiness levels with the DVA and its model basis. A concept-based value quantification is performed to optimize the development and diffusion of two weigh in motion technologies with different accuracies. Further, numerous existing case studies are classified within the proposed framework, and research and development gaps are identified.