Abstract:

Human being is born with imagination while imagination is the major driver for progresses of mankind. Plenty imaginations are the sources of creativity. Sufficient creativity is the source of innovation. Continuous innovation can urge the long term development of national economy. Mankind cannot establish the technology and culture. Innovation depends upon invention. Inventions should be managed and commercialized before contributing to the growth and profitability of an organization. Thus, innovation means all technology commercialization activities being related to idea generation, technology development, new product or product revisions, manufacturing, etc. Product planning means the process including conceiving, concept development, commercialization, and management through the whole product life cycle. Imagination is the most important capability to understand consumers’ needs, and thus, plan new products.

Albeit the technology commercialization planning imagination capability is the key success factor for innovation, very limited courses were available in universities in general, and in engineering, design, and management of technology related curriculum. To resolve the problem and enhance the national technology commercialization planning imagination capability, constructing a complete and well verified technology commercialization curriculum is very critical and urgent.

Thus, this research will summarize possible critical decision factors for selecting the course modules as well as possible course modules including scenario analysis, brain storming, TRIZ, etc. based on literature reviews. Then, final critical factors for defining the technology commercialization imagination curriculum will be defined by using the Delphi method with opinions being collected by domestic experts. Meanwhile, the possible course modules will be refined by using the brain storming approach. Then, by using DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory), the influences of each criterion within each group of critical factors for selecting the technology marketing imagination course modules will be derived. Following the derivation of critical factors, a weight versus each criterion will be defined by using the Analytic Network Process (ANP). Finally, the correlations between the critical factors for deriving the technology marketing imagination and the course modules will be derived by using the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA). The grey grade of each industrial key competency requirement will be calculated by introducing the weight of the critical factors, which was calculated by using the ANP. By using the clustering analysis method, the possible course modules will be classified into three groups, the most important, important, and not important. The most important and important course modules will be selected as the contents for raising the engineering and management students’ enhancement of imagination capability for technology commercialization.

Keywords:

Technology Commercialization, Imagination, Creativity, Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Curriculum Development.