Joseph P. Martino’s scientific contributions

Cases of technological forecasts that failed are well known, yet careful use of forecasting techniques can help avoid misdirected R&D. Three techniques are commonly used in normative forecasting, the first step in R&D planning: relevance trees, morphological models, and mission-flow diagrams. The paper discusses these techniques and touches upon exploratory forecasts (timing the project), plotting the trends, compensating for growth constraints, and presents the Delphi technique which was devised to negate the extrapolation shortcomings. Refs.