In contrast to more traditional technology assessments, our method encompasses the perspectives of the diverse actors in the social context of technology development and diffusion. It influences their decision making on technology design and diffusion in order to improve this technology's later clinical as well as social effectiveness.
This study supported the evaluation by a rehabilitation team of the performance of two treatment options that improve the arm-hand function in subjects with sixth cervical vertebra (C6) level Motor Group 2 tetraplegia. The analytic hierarchy process, a technique for multicriteria decision analysis, was used by a rehabilitation team and potential recipients to quantitatively compare a new technology, Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES), with conventional surgery. Performance was measured by functional improvement, treatment load, risks, user-friendliness, and social outcomes. Functional improvement after FES was considered better than that after conventional surgery. However, the rehabilitation team's overall rating for conventional surgery was slightly higher than that for FES (57% vs 44%). Compared with the rehabilitation team, potential recipients gave greater weight to burden of treatment and less weight to functional improvement. This study shows that evaluation of new technology must be more comprehensive than the evaluation of functional improvement alone, and that patient preferences may differ from those of the rehabilitation team.
This study analyses the effects of Team Expert Choice on group decision-making in collaborative new product development. We applied Team Expert Choice to support a product evaluation conducted by a new product development group composed of professionally diverse members. The evaluation resulted in valuable guidelines for improving the development and diffusion of the product. According to the evaluators, Team Expert Choice enhanced task processes, social processes, task outcomes and social outcomes of this product evaluation. In this context of collaborative new product development, Team Expert Choice proved to be an appropriate tool for group decision-making.
In the second half of inter-organizational product development, the new product is likely to face significant design changes. Our study focused on the adequacy of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to support the collaborative partners to steer and align the accompanying design activities. It quantitatively supported discussions between researchers, engineers, manufacturers and future users involved in the development of a voice-producing prosthesis. These discussions focused on the planning of respectively the product design objectives, design changes, and design activities. This product design planning was based on the product requirements relevant to the diverse groups involved, a pro-active view on the market circumstances, the available knowledge, skills and resources, lead-time and costs. The outcomes showed that the AHP is an adequate tool for R&D managers to support inter-organizational product development.
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