An Approach to Generating Reference Information for Technology Evaluation

• Main Authors: Eungchan Kim, Young Seok Ock, Seung-Jun Shin, Wonchul Seo
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2018-09-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: technology evaluation; reference information; peer group; firm similarity
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/9/3200

A system for technology evaluation is essential for successfully implementing a technology-based financial support system. Technology evaluation has generally relied on the qualitative evaluation performed by the relevant experts. When evaluating the technologies that a certain target firm possesses, the previous evaluation results for other firms that are similar to the target firm are used together for the purpose of improving the efficiency of the qualitative evaluation. To do this, technology evaluation institutes including, KOTEC, have presented a way to create a peer group and generate reference information in order to provide a clear guidance to the evaluators. However, the current approaches have limitations in that they cannot explore the detailed features of the individual firms. Therefore, this study proposes a systematic approach to generate reference information that facilitates efficient technology evaluation. We first create a peer group by collecting the relevant firms that have similarities with a certain target firm, and then measure the internal and external similarities between the target firm and all of the firms included in the peer group. We define the average value of similarities according to each evaluation rating as density, and finally generate the distribution and the descriptive statistics for the density as reference information. We expect that this study can contribute to improving the efficiency of qualitative evaluation work by provide practical reference information. Furthermore, the reliability of the technology evaluation will also be improved by reducing the difference in the evaluation results due to the individual differences of the evaluator.