Introduction

Accurate technological forecasting is extraordinarily important. It can allow managers to shape technology strategy, to prevent continued investment in technologies that are long past their prime, and to guard against premature commitment to untried technologies whose long-term potential is limited. Unfortunately, accurate technological forecasting is notoriously difficult (see some of the other chapters in this volume).

In this chapter, I hope to contribute to the practice of technological forecasting through a detailed analysis of the usefulness of one tool that has been widely advanced as a guide to technological foresight: the technology life cycle (Van Wyk, 1985). I use the history of optical photolithographic alignment technology to suggest that the uncritical application of the life cycle as a forecasting tool may have quite dangerous implications. The life cycle is a useful ex post descriptive device: appropriate proscriptive use of it requires a detailed understanding of the underlying technological, economic, and social dynamics on which it rests, in combination with a critical awareness of the ways in which industry acceptance of the life cycle as a descriptive tool can obscure these dynamics, making it very difficult to use it with any accuracy.

Industry pundits have been confidently using the technological life cycle to predict the death of optical photolithography since 1977, yet it remains the tool of choice in leading-edge semiconductor production (Figure 9.1). The factors that lie behind this singularly unsuccessful forecasting effort throw considerable light on the limits of the technological life cycle as a forecasting tool.