A product must be sold, a piece of equipment must be used, or a unit of military weaponry must be put into production in order to qualify as examples of transferred technology. A Four-Stage Process of Technical Advance. The first step in the process of utilization of technology is demand recognition. Some precise definitional considerations are necessary before the basic concept of demand recognition can be used. A more common expression is need recognition.
Needs are infinite.
There must be a willingness to act, to allocate resources to meet a given need, before need is translated into demand. At the time of Galbraith's book, these needs were not expressed as demands, and funds were not supplied for such activities as air pollution control, education of the poor, and health services for the aced. A critical factor in technology transfer is, therefore, the recognition of demands that are not being satisfied by the technology currently in use. A second factor is the recognition of technical feasibility. Large expenditures are made in fields such as high energy particle physics and lasers because of technical feasibility recognition despite the failure to link the expected advances in technical capabilities with specified uses that are based upon demand recognition.