Measuring Newness

This article deals with ‘newness’, an important characteristic of research-and-development projects. Newness consumes resources and provides effectiveness or profit, and is mainly considered to be of a qualitative nature yielding only to an expert’s intuition. This article is focused on a numerical measure of newness and the closely connected concept of technological advance. The mesure is described in a technial parameter space against a set of analogous objects, presented by its center, eigenvalues and eigenvectors. Specfic features and behavior of the selected measure of newness are analyzed. A numerical example is also included.