Case Study: Technology Horizon Scanning

“Technological Horizon Scanning,” as it is known, assumes that the greater the distance between any two fields – say, computational quantum mechanics and weather risk indexing – the more unlikely their combination and the larger the impact of a possible fusion.

Using a robust statistical clustering, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) methodology helps identify pairs of topical candidates for examination. Each technology is disassembled to its components and those elements are analyzed “against” one another. Through a series of conjectures, which accounts for the distance from one technology to another, permutations are evaluated and ranked. Recorded Future’s Temporal Analytics™ Engine provides the ability to structure increasingly untenable amounts of data and provide context for real-world instances of disparate technologies combining. DOD used data visualizations and queries to keep abreast of the edges of various fields without losing complexity.

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