How to Compare Competing Technologies Objectively

When two technologies promise the same outcome, how do you know which one will actually win?

Every R&D leader, innovation strategist, and product decision-maker faces the same dilemma: multiple options, conflicting opinions, limited time, and high stakes. Relying on gut feel, vendor hype, or incomplete metrics can lead to costly mistakes.

This is where a fundamental shift in perspective is needed: The next time you’re choosing between competing technologies, don’t just ask what’s best — ask what’s improving the fastest. 

Performance tomorrow rarely looks like performance today

Too often, teams base decisions on:

• Cost comparisons
• Market interest
• Vendor roadmaps
• Hype or expert preference

These approaches miss the rate of progress—the key to identifying future winners and avoiding dead-ends. Research shows that technologies don't just improve; they tend to improve exponentially at a surprisingly consistent rate over long periods. This predictable pace, akin to compound interest in a bank account, means that even if an emerging technology is far behind today, its faster improvement rate can allow it to catch up and eventually surpass the incumbent. Historically, the technology with the fastest improvement rate among competitors is the one that tends to dominate in the long run. 

This is where the concept of the Technology Improvement Rate (TIR) comes into play. Inspired by foundational research from MIT, which empirically measured improvement rates across various technology domains, TIR provides a quantitative measure of a technology's momentum— which is encoded within patent data. 

Patents serve as documented snapshots of invention, detailing new ideas and how they build on previous work. By analyzing citation patterns within these documents, two key metrics can be derived to predict the rate of improvement:

• Cycle Time: Measures the average age of older patents cited by newer ones in a technology area. A shorter cycle time indicates that new inventions are building on very recent work, signifying a rapid pace or frequency of innovation steps.

• Knowledge Flow: Measures how often a new patent is cited by later patents shortly after its publication. High knowledge flow suggests the new invention is influential and represents a significant, impactful step forward.

Combining short cycle times (fast steps) and high knowledge flow (big steps) predicts a high rate of technological improvement. It is crucial to understand that TIR is a comparative metric, and not an absolute one. Its value lies in comparing the improvement rate of one technology directly against its competitors. The "delta," or difference, between these rates reveals which technology is improving faster and is therefore more likely to eventually dominate the market.

GetFocus operationalizes the TIR approach in the following manner:

• Scout technologies: Quickly identify all relevant emerging technologies in a specific domain using AI and global invention data.
• Map the landscape: Map out the inventions that matter from the emerging technologies in your scouting stage.
• Compare technologies: Identify genuine breakthroughs and avoid costly distractions.
• Deep-dive for insights: Gain detailed insights into specific topics, competitor activity or trends and key developments.

The predictive power of this method is illustrated by historical examples. Analysis suggests that, with this approach, one could have predicted the eventual dominance of:

• Digital photography over film as early as 1983, almost two decades before film sales declined significantly.
• SSDs became more cost-effective than HDDs, with diverging trends visible in the early '80s.
• Lithium-ion batteries improved faster than combustion engines for vehicles since their invention, a trend that might have been visible even in the 90s.
• The rise of LFP batteries, with a disruption signal as early as 2011.

Instead of chasing hype or relying on potentially biased opinions, R&D leaders and technology innovation strategists can see which technologies have demonstrable momentum based on measurable signals in invention data. They can compare competing options in minutes, drastically reducing the time and effort traditionally spent on technology evaluation. This efficiency allows teams to ask "bigger questions" and iterate faster.

By focusing on the quantifiable rate of improvement, GetFocus allows you to move away from subjective, bias-prone evaluations to objective, data-driven insights. 

Identify promising technologies early, make smarter investment decisions, allocate resources effectively, and stay ahead of the competition by anticipating future shifts years or even decades in advance.

Ready to de-risk your technology bets? 

If you're curious which of the competing technologies in your domain are gaining momentum, running a comparison using their rate of improvement can provide the measurable insights needed to make your next bet with confidence. Let the numbers guide you—talk to our team of experts.

‍