Strategic planning for research institutions: An approach towards identifying the most attractive path for technology development

The transfer of technology knowledge from research institutions into industry is a quite demanding task and often to be condemned to fail. In many cases, the main reason is the inability of research institutions in capturing market needs and market requirements as well as considering them in their future technology development. But how to outfit research institutions with the rules of the free market economy and how to transform the identified actual and future market needs into the strategic planning for the technology? This paper introduces a method for the identification of actual and future market needs and their transformation into the strategic technology planning by using graph theoretical approaches.