Technology assessment and evaluation

The assessment and evaluation of the impacts of technologies is a central, ambitious and complex task of Technology Assessment (TA) that requires extensive methodological knowledge and skills. This chapter provides an overview of the practice of assessment and evaluation. The methodological approaches of disciplinary and prospective impact assessment are presented as TA builds on established disciplinary methods for assessing quantifiable impacts, such as Life Cycle Assessment or Techno-Economic Analysis. Transfer work is required to adapt them accordingly and make them fruitful for TA issues. TA is orientated towards normative evaluation concepts, particularly the guiding principle of Responsible Innovation and Research and Sustainable Development. This means a significant increase in complexity and tradeoffs in the evaluation process. Multi-criteria approaches (MCDA) can solve this dilemma, reduce complexity and systematically identify conflicting objectives. Another advantage of MCDA is the systematic involvement of stakeholders; the disadvantage is a need for more transparency and the influence of the method on the result.