Presenting a Model for Evaluating Technological Innovation Capability for Attaining Turbocharge Technology

Recent evolutions in World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international trading agreements have made industries all around the world face a new era of intense global competition. Simultaneously with increased competitive pressure, permanent development and innovation comprise building blocks of firm excellence. In a dynamic environment, failure to innovate ends up with business stagnation and getting out of the competition ring. Technological innovation capability is a complex, elusive and uncertain concept, which have made it difficult to characterize. Measuring technological innovation capability requires considering numerous qualitative and quantitative criteria at the same time. One of the main factors hindering the success of adopting technological innovation to attain competitive advantage by firms in developing countries is lack of awareness about and recognition of the level of firm technological capabilities and how to use them to acquire relative advantages. Evaluation of technological capability serves as a tool for identifying the required capabilities to implement the firm technological priorities. Based on a wide spectrum of available literature, the present paper attempts to extract criteria related to technological innovation capabilities in the field of turbocharging technology. These criteria were then provided to a group of experts in automotive industry, so as to identify the desired level of technology for turbocharging technology in automotive industry. On the other hand, by restricting items of the questionnaire based on the experts’ opinions, the current state of turbocharging technology capabilities was identified, based on which technological gap in each criterion under study was determined. On the other hand, once the technological gap was identified, improvement projects were defined to either suppress or eliminate the gap.