An across data sources environmental scanning mechanism for issue analysis

This study proposes a mechanism that provides researchers an efficient way to conduct environmental scanning from different data sources with consideration of the consistency between research issue and retrieved data. The international trend reports, foresight databases, scientific literatures, US patents, R&D investment and human resources databases are linked by this study. Furthermore, each of the developing trends, technologies from international trend reports, foresight databases are categorized into societal demand and technology support respectively. As a result, an overall view of world societal demands will be unveiled, with possible solutions. This article proposes Taiwan as a case study by using, the government R&D investment database, literature & US patent database and human resource database as proxies to reflect the responses and output when facing the challenges in such a rapidly changing world. The solar energy, one of the renewable energy technologies, is adopted as a target in the case to examine the effects of proposed environmental scanning mechanism. The world future energy development will be illustrated from both social demand and technology perspectives, and the hierarchical technology tree of solar energy is further discussed together with Taiwan's R&D input and output.