Technometrics: Origins, historical evolution and new directions

This paper analyses the origins and historical evolution of technometrics, a discipline that measures and evaluates technological change with important policy implications. Technometric approaches, initiated in the 1950s, with the pioneering researches carried out by the scholars of The RAND Corporation staff. In the second half of the twentieth century, technometrics becomes a distinct field of investigation, characterised by the coming together of several disciplines, such as econometrics, engineering and applied mathematics, mathematical and multivariate statistics, and so on. This survey presents the main techniques of technometrics, developed over the course of time, showing their potential and methodological difficulties. Some concluding remarks and lessons learned complete the research.