Engineers at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) have developed a technique for forecasting technological advancement. Researchers successfully determined the improvement rates of 28 different technologies, including solar photovoltaic, 3-D printing, fuel-cell technology, and genome sequencing. They started by scanning approximately 500,000 technology related patents using a new method for selecting the patents that suit each technology. By analysing metrics of patents in each domain they found that some forward citations predict technological growth more than others. They devised an equation using…