Accenture's automated tech trend seeker

Posted by: Stephen Baker on May 28

Talked to researchers at Accenture about a new system they’ve developed that automatically makes assessments on how far certain technologies are from the marketplace. It’s called “Lifecycle Tracker.” And, needless to say, it’s a tool designed and built by the people I call the Numerati.

Here’s the idea and the link. (Download file) Say a partner at a venture fund is looking at a Wimax startup. The question: how close is this technology to the marketplace? The Accenture tool scours the Internet for patents, news releases, articles, product launches, etc. In an early version, it draws a bar chart for each technology, comparing “hype” to “reality.” Wimax, for example, has 630 promises (or hype) and 135 examples of companies taking action (reality). That may sound like a lot of hot air.

But compare it to the results for “infrastructure cloud.” That kind of computing (in which I have participated in what Accenture’s machine would consider hype) racks up 3,649 hype events compared to only 369 announcements.

Now, the temptation may be to look at the ratios and to conclude that Wimax, with reality at 20% of hype, is further along than “infrastructure cloud,” where hype outweighs reality by 10-1. But despite all the cloud hype, that technology is generating nearly three times as many real events. So the conclusion depends on what you count.

Accenture’s latest system, LifeCycle Tracker, actually attempts to map the stage of each technology, from a glimmer in a laboratory to broad-based success and, finally, decline. (Many, of course, never advance far past the glimmer.) Like many of the Numerati’s tools, these sacrifice the nuanced perceptions of humans for the speed and scale of automatic systems. But every day, researchers are adding more nuance.

TrackBack URL for this entry: http://blogs.businessweek.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/