Technology roadmapping for R&D planning: The case of the Korean parts and materials industry

A technology roadmap (TRM) is a management tool to support strategic and long-term R&D planning. Providing a framework to link business to technology, it is especially useful for, and thus has been widely used in, current R&D management strategies that focus on markets and customers. In spite of this popularity, the fact that only few practical guidelines are offered towards building TRM makes it appear to have limited flexibility in terms of building process and final outputs.To overcome these limitations and facilitate the spread of TRM technique, we focus on the TRM for R&D purposes, and propose a systematic process and detailed procedures with inputs/outputs for building TRM. We also attempt to integrate existing management tools with the TRM process. The proposed framework is applied to the R&D planning process of a government program managed by the Korea Industrial Technology Foundation. While the report is specific to the parts and materials industry, the proposed framework can be generalized to other industries, and we anticipate our paper will shed light on the processes of establishing R&D strategy, coordinating R&D programs and setting priorities among R&D projects.