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Breakthrough Technologies 21ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING DESIGN, ICED17 21-25 AUGUST 2017, THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER, CANADA BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES: PRINCIPLE FEASIBILITY DEBATES Hein, Andreas Makoto (1); Jankovic, Marija (1); Condat, Hélène (2) 1: CentraleSupélec, Université Paris Saclay, France; 2: Initiative for Interstellar Studies, United Kingdom Abstract Designing new technologies involves creating something that did not exist before. In particular, designing technologies with a low degree of maturity usually involves an assessment of its feasibility or infeasibility. Assessing the feasibility of a technology is of vital importance in many domains such as technology management and policy. Despite its importance, few publications actually deal with the fundamentals of technological feasibility such as feasibility proofs or proposing different feasibility categories. This paper addresses this gap by reviewing the existing literature on the feasibility of low- maturity technologies, proposes a framework for assessing feasibility issues, and reconstructs past and ongoing feasibility debates of four exemplary technologies. For the four technologies analysed, we conclude that sufficient expected performance is a key feasibility criteria to all cases, whereas physical effects and working principles were issues for more speculative technologies. For future work, we propose the further development of feasibility categories for different technologies of different degrees of maturity. Keywords: Systems Engineering (SE), Technology, Conceptual design, Early design phases, Uncertainty Contact: Andreas Makoto Hein CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay Laboratoire Génie Industriel France [email protected] Please cite this paper as: Surnames, Initials: Title of paper. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED17), Vol. 2: Design Processes | Design Organisation and Management, Vancouver, Canada, 21.-25.08.2017. 477 1 INTRODUCTION A breakthrough technology in the following is defined as a technology that offers a radically new capability or a performance improvement of at least an order of magnitude. The innovation literature has considered these technologies in the context of “radical innovation”, although radical innovation encompasses a far larger set of technologies than breakthrough technologies, as it is not limited to capabilities and performance (Chandy and Prabhu, 2010; Garcia and Calantone, 2002; Kotsemir, 2013). The turbojet, inertial navigation, the Google search engine, and autonomous driving are breakthrough technologies. Breakthrough technologies are also considered to be fundamental for sustainable new business models (Masters and Thiel, 2014; Teller, 2013). These technologies can lead to radical changes to the status quo. The turbojet enabled fast and affordable intercontinental travel, inertial navigation enabled a whole class of systems such as long-range aircraft, rocket launchers, and ballistic missiles. The Google search engine enabled almost instant information retrieval from existing knowledge. Fundamental questions about breakthrough technologies are how to assess their feasibility at an early stage, how to quickly reduce key uncertainties regarding feasibility, how to integrate the technology into a product, how to design the enabling systems required for its successful operation, and how to evaluate the readiness of the context into which the product is introduced. These are questions that have been addressed for technologies in general in the technology management literature (Burgelman et al., 1996; Schilling, 2013). Some exploratory proposals have been made regarding uncertainty reduction for breakthrough technologies (Drexler, 2009) and feasibility categories (Cleaver, 1977). The product development and systems engineering literature has previously treated the infusion of new technologies into an existing system architecture (Moullec et al., 2013; Suh et al., 2010). Furthermore, the systems engineering literature has proposed various metrics for assessing the maturity of a technology such as the Technology Readiness Levels (Mankins, 1995), Manufacturing Readiness Levels (Cundiff, 2003), and System Readiness Levels (Sauser et al., 2006). However, breakthrough technologies have often characteristics that make their assessment challenging and most approaches from the literature no longer applicable. For realizing a radically new capability and/or an order of magnitude increase in performance, often, new physical effects and new working principles are used which require the assessment of principle feasibility. Furthermore, to create new business models, new operational principles have to be developed that allow for a proper exploitation of the capability or performance in the market place. There are also numerous cases where breakthrough technologies have been injected into products too early, which lead to a failure in the market place, as, e.g. enabling systems were not present. In successful cases, existing enabling technologies were quickly adapted in order to allow for a proper exploitation of the breakthrough technology, such as aircraft fuselages for the turbojet. For example, initial jet airplane designs were based on straight-wing designs, as they already existed, instead of swept wings that have a better aerodynamic performance but needed to be newly developed. The Google search engine would not have been successful without a large number of internet users and websites. The literature on the sociology of technology and technology history has dealt with this interaction and co-evolution of technologies (Bijker et al., 1987; Constant, 1980; MacKenzie, 1987). Although other domains such as sociology and technology history have addressed breakthrough technologies, we argue that the existing product development and systems engineering literature has not yet addressed these technologies sufficiently to provide companies and policy-makers with guidance on how to assess these technologies. As a first step towards addressing the initially mentioned research questions, in this paper, we deal with the question of principle feasibility. More specifically, with the questions what types of arguments were put forward for / against principle feasibility and how the feasibility issues were resolved. By “principle feasibility” we mean that a technology can possibly be realized regarding its underlying physical effects and working principles. This would correspond to the TRLs 0 to 3, where physical effects are confirmed and technology concepts formulated. Whereas TRL proposes a maturity metric, we are more interested in the debate around the feasibility assessment that enables a proper TRL classification. Principle feasibility seems to be debated before classic feasibility proofs such as prototypes or results from experiments exist. Although it might seem that principle feasibility regarding physical effects and working principles have a clear yes / no answer, we demonstrate by using records from historical and 478 ICED17 ongoing debates that converting physical effects into applicable engineering knowledge is not trivial and the framing of the feasibility question plays an important role. In the following, we limit our focus on technologies as physical artifacts (hardware) along with their design (Hein, 2016; Olechowski et al., 2015). For software and algorithms, feasibility issues are more closely related to logic, proofs, and mathematics, e.g. calculability that seem to be quite different in nature from feasibility issues pertaining to physical artifacts. We first conduct a literature survey on breakthrough technologies. Based on a conceptual model for physical technologies, we reconstruct four past and current feasibility debates to assess the types of arguments that are / were put forward. Finally, we assess, which elements of the conceptual model were subject of the debates, the associated types of arguments, and which technology elements then contributed to the resolution of the issue. 2 LITERATURE SURVEY 2.1 Definitions In the following, we introduce a set of definitions. First of all, the term “technology” needs to be defined. According to Bijker et al. (1987), technologies fall into three categories: • Physical objects or artifacts: bicycles, lamps, Bakelite; • Activities or processes: steel making or molding (We would put algorithms, methods, instructions into this category); • Knowledge pertaining to the first two categories: What people know as well as what they do. In this paper, we rather focus on technology in the narrow sense of a physical object or artefact. Next, the term “feasibility” needs to be defined. The definition for feasibility which is used in this paper is: “Capable of being accomplished or brought about; possible” (The Free Dictionary, 2016). “Feasible” can be substituted by “possible” or “can be realized” in the context of technologies and technical systems. Typical statements are: • “Interstellar travel is feasible” • “Artificial intelligence is feasible” • “We have shown that a nuclear-electric mission to Jupiter is feasible.” As mentioned in the introduction, by “principle feasibility” we mean feasibility on the conceptual level of a technology, where the applicability or existence of physical effects and working principles for a technology are debated. Typical principle feasibility statements are: • Is it feasible to use nuclear fusion for fusion reactors? • Are artificial nanomachines feasible? 2.2 Feasibility
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