Principal Advisor for Technology Management, Concurrent Technologies Corporation
For more than twenty-five years, Dr. Brad Ashton has provided assistance to a variety of business, government and international organizations for establishing, executing and/ or improving technology intelligence and scouting (TIS) programs. He began his career as an Air Force intelligence officer and has since been active as a competitive intelligence / TIS practitioner, advisor, speaker, panelist and teacher for private companies and government research and development (R&D) programs in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
To support the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Dr. Ashton helped establish technology intelligence at Battelle Pacific Northwest Laboratories and created the DOE International Research Monitoring Program to track foreign technical development work in energy and helped shape US DOE R&D investments. In Canada, Dr. Ashton helped develop TIS programs for laboratories of the National Research Council of Canada (CNRC) thru the formerly named Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI). He trained many CISTI staff over a period of several years and worked hands-on with TIS teams to gather, evaluate and deliver technical information to CNRC customers. For the Mexican petroleum organization, PEMEX, and their R&D laboratories, the Instituto Mexicano del Petroleo (IMP), Dr. Ashton advised and trained technical staff and program directors on applying TIS efforts to ensure that development programs maintained technical leadership.
He contributed to innovative methods for analyzing primary, secondary and electronic competitive technology information, was an early developer of tools to analyze international patent data. He organized domestic and international TIS conferences and served on invited panels addressing TIS and innovation. Dr. Ashton has over 40 professional publications and presentations, and has edited two leading books on technology intelligence.
In 1999, he was recognized as a Fellow in the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and was a founding member of the Council of Competitive Intelligence Fellows.