Technology roadmapping with structuring knowledge and its advantages in R&D management

Knowledge continues to subdivide themselves and fuse among themselves. It is not practically feasible to manage such subdivision and fusion directly. One promising idea is to place an interface layer to envisage the correlation between knowledge by making three-layer-structure, subdivision layer, interface layer, and fusion layer. Technology roadmap plays a role of the interface. With technology roadmap, we can overlook the total perspective of specific technology domain. If we take an example of nanotechnology (NT), it is not so easy to develop technology roadmap to overlook its total perspective due to its complicate and interdisciplinary nature. However, it is quite essential to understand business direction as well as technology direction to predict NT-based industrial development. In this paper, we explain two steps to make a technology roadmap for NT. The first step is to conduct search on NT business and to analyze what they are doing in order to clarify their target application. The second step is to structure knowledge of human professionals of the target application domain. And then we propose the sample technology roadmaps. It is possible to promote big R&D program effectively when the total perspective of the technology is overlooked and understood on the roadmap