Market Opportunity Assessments  collaboration with Battelle’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to conduct market opportunity assessments of EPA-developed technology to prioritize its use and value in the marketplace.Forecasting the impact of a technology requires a thorough understanding of the technology and its market potential. The Battelle assessments address the following technology and market issues:
The assessments must answer fundamental questions: For instance, is the technology incremental in character, or breaking with established trends? A new sampling device for a spectrometer imitative of practices already proven is an incremental technology. Sometimes, however, a technology breaks with established trends. This is the case with a protein identified in EPA toxicology studies. The protein is potentially associated with animal fertility and may therefore create a new category of testing for animal fertility. The assessments form a qualitative analysis that pieces together the technical information to form an overview of competitive challenges. The analysis requires the collection of information from many sources, including published technical literature, patent databases, and interviews with developers and potential commercial users of the technology. A key step in the assessment of a technology is to interview several high-level technology users to get their opinions of the proposed technology and to acquaint them with the possible options and potential benefits of using the technology. Once the nature of the technology is established, further refinement is required to establish barriers to commercialization. Are prototypes or field tests desired? Does the technology require any regulatory approval? How expensive and how much time will be required to establish marketplace acceptability? Some of these questions can be answered by conducting targeted searches for successful commercialization of similar technologies. The assessments provide an excellent way of prioritizing commercialization needs and technical areas. For example, of 20 analyzed technologies, four or five might be considered top priority. Battelle’s market opportunity assessments aid the commercialization of EPA technologies that improve human health and the environment. Market opportunity assessments summarized by PNNL are provided on the ETC2 Web site at www.etc2.org. For more information, please contact Joseph Jasper at (440) 686-2209 or via e-mail at jasper@battelle.org. |
| Environment Home Page | Winter '00 Issue Home Page | 
|