Our goal is to make better forecasts of technological progress with cost as a primary unit of analysis, and to provide methods that support better decision making in the allocation of technology investments. We will develop a theory of technological ecosystems, represented as networks, which will give us a quantitative model for simulating technological change.

Our predictions allow us to study the right tradeoff between diversity, which is needed to mitigate risk, and concentration in particular technologies, which is needed to drive their costs down. This will be applied to a set of renewable technologies including solar to construct investment portfolios for competing energy technologies.

Funded by:

• U.S. Department of Energy

Partners:

• University of North Carolina
• Arizona State University