Exploring the evolutional roadmapping of technological trajectory: Case study of Shimano

A technological system has trajectories that involve a path-dependent roadmap of an innovation. Evolutionary trajectory presents the direction, capability, and paradigm that help the decision making of scientists and technologists. While most visualization of technology road mapping has been done by expensive human forces, this paper proposes an automatic process to explore the path-dependent and evolution process of the underling patents. Shimano Inc. is selected due to its dominance in the bicycle component market. This paper demonstrates the benefits that such methods can help scientists and technologists in finding the related but often isolated technological fields together through the visualization process.