How Technology is Made Visible When Exploring Its Application Fields

Industrial maturation and technological accumulation have fostered the need for the exploration of new applications of existing technology. This paper identifies how R&D workers from companies or research institutions visualize and describe their technology to other entities inside and outside the organization when they are exploring a technology´s potential applications. This research uses a web-based questionnaire survey of R&D personnel working in Japan. The first finding of the survey shows that when the presentation team includes non-technical people (e.g. product development, marketing, or sales) in addition to the technical staff in-charge, technology visualization tends to be more effective. At the same time, the audience of such technology visualization should also be cross-functional. The second finding illustrates that, even though the audience is most often made up of acquaintances working within the same organization, technology visualization is also effective with non-acquaintances working in different organizations in order to lead to the successful exploration of such technology´s potential applications.