What they are talking about when they talk about an enabling technology Many people claim that their research can be positioned as an enabling technology. On Wikipedia, an enabling technology is defined as "an invention or innovation, that can be applied to drive radical change in the capabilities of a user or culture. Enabling technologies are characterized by rapid development of subsequent derivative technologies, often in diverse fields." According to this standard, most of those people overrate their research when they call it "an enabling tech". On the other hand, the above definition is too general too be useful. Instead, a much more inspiring definition was given implicitly in Tsien Hsue-shen 's "Engineering Cybernetics", in which he said in the preface: "Fluid mechanics exists as an engineering science separate from the practices of aerodynamics engineers, hydraulic engineers, meteorologists, and many others who use the results of investigations in fluid mechanics in their daily work. In fact, without fluid mechanists, the understanding and the utilization of supersonic flows would certainly be greatly delayed, to say the least." Thus, we have a new definition: an enabling technology is an invention or innovation, usually in the form of a theory or framework, without which the understanding and the utilization of certain practices would certainly be greatly delayed. There exists yet another, though more restrictive, standard for an enabling technology: is there any companies or products that are based mainly on the technology? According to these three standard, we can easily name the following enabling technologies: Page Rank(Google), CDMA (Qualcomm), Kalman Filter(GPS), etc. So, what is next real enabling tech?
标签: 使能
