Empowering technology marketing by the Innovation Support Technology (IST)

In this paper, we review technology marketing research activities and we define technology marketing as promotion and acceleration of creating and commercializing product innovation. The paper is based on the assumption that today and even more in the future, conventional marketing research approaches at product development are more and more changing. Our understanding is that besides customers centered approaches such as lead user research; also engineers shall be more involved to recognize new business opportunities, to generate corresponding ideas to finally conceptualize radically innovative products. Products are becoming technically more complicated so that potential users who are often lacking of technological and commercial awareness, cannot easily articulate their needs being unconscious of all the possibilities that modern technology offers. This understanding of technology marketing research is known as Kameoka and Meng´s (2004) forth generation technology marketing within the model of marketing paradigm. We believe in the necessity for empowering and testing the fourth generation innovation model as part of the Innovation Support Technology (IST). IST is a method developed and applied in many real world cases since autumn 2002 by the JATES Study Group. Its purpose is to offer a solid tool for engineers and researchers in order to enhance technology marketing. It consists of a business modeling method, a strategic road mapping method, and an innovation architecture method.