LESSONS LEARNED ABOUT TECHNOLOGY MONITORING IN THE SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC ENERGY SEGMENT

摘要

The practice of using technology monitoring to keep track of technological advances is increasingly valued, and its systematic use is understood as essential to business in the new knowledge economy. The structuring of the technological monitoring process has become a growing need for organizations to keep up with the significant and rapid changes of technology in their core business and to better understand its business impact in order to support the decision-making process of companies. An effective technology monitoring process should be based on a company's business needs and on the information required for the fitting to strategic guidelines. This encompasses the right selection of databases, the establishment of the search strategy and keywords to be applied, the screening of the retrieved information, the analysis and consolidation of this information, and the right format and display of the relevant data and future trends to help the management decision. Photovoltaic solar energy reached the capacity of 139 GW in 2013, being an expanding market with a high number of government funding projects in the United States and in the European Union. Therefore, a survey was carried out about the new technologies and related business scenarios for this kind of power generation, using technology monitoring tools. Energy generation via photovoltaic cells has been known for a long time, since the Becquerel studies in the XIX century. Solar photovoltaic energy enables the generation of distributed electric energy, preventing long transmission and distribution lines, besides being a silent energy source that can be easily integrated into buildings without the need of additional installation areas; for these reasons, its application is being fostered by government programs. The main step of the technology monitoring methodology is discussed, and the peculiarities and difficulties encountered in the process are pointed out. A survey of the scientific and technological developments in this area of knowledge was carried out, using patents and scientific papers with the time frame from the beginning of 2008 to the end of 2013. The lessons learned in this process and the major facilitating factors and difficulties for the retrieval, screening and analysis of the information collected are reported.