In recent decades, rapid technological development has had a deep impact on changing and progress of human life. As a result, many researchers and policymakers try to trace technology’s trends and evolutions. Monitoring technologies’ progress and surveying new phenomena in the technical field from a perspective the name of “technology scouting” is an interesting arena for policymakers, technology managers and futurists. Nowadays there are so many jobs in various corporations and organizations that are related to technology observatory and scouting. In addition, organizations have developed new structures with scanning and monitoring centers at top levels. The main task of these centers is technology watch. Despite the importance and critical role of technology scouting, while global societies have given so much attention to this subject, unfortunately in Iran it has not been taken appropriate attention and even the level of publication in this field is negligible. Forasmuch as the national needs, in this book, we try to fill the some of this gap. The book is organized into six chapters and seven appendixes. In the first chapter, we discuss “Intelligence”, an important topic that has a lot of overlap with scouting. The second chapter is an overall look at the concept of scouting and other related ones. The third chapter is about the scouting process and discusses the steps that we have to take in a scouting project. The fourth chapter addresses the administrative considerations in the scouting process. The fifth chapter discusses “tech mining” which is a practical method for technology scouting and in the sixth and the last chapter we study a case in which “tech mining” has been applied. While we try to cover the subject more, undoubtedly according to any other interdisciplinary subject, there may be some points that we neglect. So, we would appreciate any idea, suggestion and criticism in this regard.
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