Technology assessment to board decision: give every route a verdict

An assessment becomes a recommendation when every competing technology in it carries a verdict: fund, monitor, phase out or ignore, each with the evidence behind it, the cost of getting it wrong and the trigger that would change it. Most assessments stop one step short. They describe the landscape and leave the choice to the board, which then defers it. GetFocus builds that verdict from the improvement rate and maturity of every route, and a first pass takes 48 hours.

Why do technology assessments end without a decision?

Because they are written to inform, not to decide. Board-paper guidance gives the same first fix: start from the decision the board owns, not from the data. Most organisations do not lack technology data. They lack the step that turns it into a choice.

Technology assessments miss that step in three predictable ways:

Counting attention is the costly one. In all seven GetFocus backtests, filing volume pointed at the technology that lost, years before the market settled it. Volume is the consensus. The rate is the signal.

The problem grows with the number of options. Christophe Perthuisot, former SVP of R&D at Moët Hennessy (LVMH), describes what the analysis has to do for him: "It allows you to boil things down from perhaps 100 solutions to the three, four, or five you really need to examine." (Read his story.)

This applies to decisions between competing technologies for the same job: chemistries, process routes, materials, architectures. An IT-estate review or a cyber audit is a different assessment with a different deliverable.

What does a recommendation the board will act on contain?

Five things, in this order. Leave one out and the decision slips to the next meeting.

1. The decision, written as an action. "Fund pilots of route A" is approvable. "Route A shows promise" is not.
2. Every competing route, each with a verdict. Fund, monitor, phase out or ignore, including the incumbent you keep by doing nothing.
3. The evidence, dated and from outside the company. Improvement rate and maturity per route, with the date of the readout.
4. The cost of being wrong in each direction. What acting early costs, and what arriving late costs.
5. The trigger and the owner. What would move each verdict, and who is watching for it.

The GetFocus Chemicals Technology Strategy Radar on low-carbon ethylene shows what that looks like. Five of its fourteen routes, from the September 2026 readout:

The headline carries its own condition: CO₂ electrolysis will not match cracking on energy per tonne, and it is improving fast enough that power prices now decide. It improves at 44.1% a year, more than three times the steam-cracking benchmark, yet where patents quote energy it still needs 38 to 74 MWh per tonne against 1.5 to 5.7 for electrified cracking. A board can approve that, and it knows exactly what would change it.

For the single slide that carries this into the room, use the format in how to present an R&D bet to a board. The paper underneath that slide is the table above.

How do you make the recommendation defensible?

Directors ask the same things of any technical recommendation: who says so, has it worked before, how does it work, and what does a mistake cost. Answer all four on the page.

• Independent. Evidence from outside the company carries weight the project team's own view cannot. GetFocus reads the global patent record, 180M+ patents, so the rate of a rival route is a measurement, not an internal opinion.
• Replayable. The method has a record you can check. Every backtest uses only the patents public at each date. The Kodak backtest separated digital from film on rate in 1983, seventeen years before film sales fell off a cliff.
• Explainable. The rate is a regression on two citation metrics, cycle time and knowledge flow, built on peer-reviewed MIT research (Triulzi, Alstott & Magee, 2020). Every claim in a GetFocus evidence table traces back to the patent families behind it.
• Priced. Put both bills on the page. Arriving late usually has to be bought: each backtest ends on one, from Kodak's $31B of market value to the $2.7B an ATM leader wrote down in 2023. Arriving early can be slowed down with a pilot, a licence or a capped first stage.

Show the routes you rejected and why. A recommendation that names its alternatives reads as judgement. One that names only the winner reads as advocacy.

Who can deliver a technology assessment before next month's board meeting?

For a decision between competing technologies, the answer depends on whether the board needs a first read or a validated plan.

The Decision Brief is preliminary by design: a first scan built on what you share in the briefing, and you keep it either way. If the decision is too sensitive to share, we walk you through how we would approach it with an example built on your business context. On pace, Christophe Perthuisot's verdict after using the platform: "In a week with GetFocus, we achieved more than what we previously could in nine months."

FAQ

How quickly can an outside provider deliver a first technology assessment?

For a choice between competing technologies, a first-pass radar with an improvement rate per route takes 48 hours with the free GetFocus Decision Brief. A validated, board-ready roadmap for one decision takes four to six weeks.

What should a board paper on a technology decision include?

The decision written as an action, every competing route with a verdict, dated evidence from outside the company, the cost of being wrong in both directions, and the trigger that would change the call.

How do you turn technology reports into decisions?

Start from the decision the board owns and reduce every report to one comparison: how fast each route improves, and how mature it is. Anything that cannot move a verdict goes to the appendix.

What if the evidence is not conclusive yet?

Then the verdict is "monitor closely", with the threshold that would move it and an owner watching for it. That is still a decision: the board approves a watch with a trigger, not an open question.