R.C. Boekel Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage A Subject-Action-Object based text mining methodology for finding, selecting and evaluating nanotechnologies for innovation problem solving. Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage A Subject-Action-Object based text mining methodology for finding, selecting and evaluating nanotechnologies for innovation problem solving. By Roel Cornelis Boekel 4319613 in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management at the Delft University of Technology, to be defended publicly on Monday November 14, 2016 at 14:00 AM. Thesis committee Chair: Prof. Dr. M. van Geenhuizen TU Delft 1st Supervisor: Dr. S. Cunningham TU Delft 2nd Supervisor: Dr. C. Werker TU Delft 3rd Supervisor: Dr. L. Rambausek DESSO The appendix of this thesis is confidential and cannot be made public until October 2019 An electronic version of this thesis is available at http://repository.tudelft.nl/. 2 Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel 3 Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” – Richard Feynman 4 Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel I Preface Amsterdam, October 30, 2016 Eleven months ago I emailed Scott with the question if he could help me with the first steps of my graduation project. At that time, I read an article by him and Claudia on the influence of proximity and collaboration in nanotechnology development. I was thrilled to find the connection between the faculty and nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is such an amazing development, just imagine, with nanotechnology we can manipulate atoms and molecules which are so small that we can hardly obtain them with the most advanced measuring equipment. Until now we have only been able to understand its behavior based on mathematical calculations some smart people designed from the 30s to the 50s. Yet everything in the world is constructed by atoms and molecules. Humans itself are a unique, and amazingly advanced composition of molecules. With nanotechnology we are able to understand this more and more and we are not only able to understand, we are also able to manipulate, design and produce nanotechnologies. This is all very scary but also extremely exciting! With the development of the field new social challenges will lie ahead. The risks of nanotechnology are certainly there and everything we do not understand that may be harmful must be thoroughly assessed. But imagine, understanding nanoscale interactions will enable people to learn from nature and back trace billions of years of advanced nanotechnology to think of systems like DNA, photosynthesis and life in general. I believe that we can make the most beautiful solutions by understanding nature better, solutions that could definitely help solving challenges in energy, sustainability and life quality that are ahead of us. Therefore, I wanted to integrate nanotechnology and SEPAM skills, and if possible, innovation in my graduation project. The paper by Scott and Claudia were the start of making this possible. I found out quite quickly that bibliometrics would be a perfect match of combining these three fields. And here I am, eleven months later, I deliver a methodology that allows to find, select and evaluate nanotechnologies for innovation purposes. Secretly I am very proud at what I present, but without others I would never have been able to present what I have written today. That is definitely something I have learned during this thesis process, that without any help, without reflection, without interaction it is pretty damn hard to create and realize your ideas. I therefore want to take some space to thank the people that helped me realize the thesis and helped me through the project. First of all, I want to thank Scott Cunningham for being helpful from day one in guiding me in the process from a student to a Master of Science (if everything goes well ;-) ). He helped me with understanding the content in all the fields I used; nanotechnology, innovation management, text mining and systems engineering. I can assure you, that is quite a bunch of knowledge. Furthermore, I really liked the talks, from the philosophical talks about innovation to the talks about US elections. I am very thankful to Lina Rambausek who brought me onboard to DESSO and was able to use both her PhD and business skills in supervising. This was really a blessing because it enabled a seamless fit between the needs of DESSO and the requirements the University has for a research. We also had some good laughs, and I’m really thankful despite being called a character from “despicable me” sometimes. Furthermore, in DESSO I want to thank Ruben de Reu and Hans Roelandt for taking the time for explaining the technical processes and answering all my questions. 5 Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel I also want to thank Marina van Geenhuizen and Claudia Werker for their comments and guidance in the graduation project. I want to thank Vincent Franken, Jeffrey Kruijswijk and Lise Leijtens for taking the time to understand my research, editing and listening to all the ideas I had for my research. I want to thank Eva van Loon and my family for supporting me throughout the project. I want to thank Michiel van Daal for his reflections and smart ideas for the research validation. That really is something for a lawyer. Finally, I want to thank my co-students and friends for thinking along and for their recommendations on the research design. I’m feeling honored that you all wanted to help me! Sincerely, Roel Boekel MSc. Student Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management. 6 Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage | R.C. Boekel II Executive summary Nanotechnology is an emerging technology field that will influence many industries. It can be seen as a toolbox of technologies that obtain their function based on their nanoscale activity. On the macro scale, this results in special functionalities of materials and products. Examples include lightweight materials, increased chemical performance, electro-conductivity and morphology improvement. Because these functionalities are multi-applicable, nanotechnology has been proposed often as a general purpose technology. For this reason, the expectations of nanotechnology are high and for years, it is hoped that nanotechnology would turn into a mass-market industry. This industry has not yet been observed. Three reasons are discussed; first, the nanotechnology industry is diverged and fragmented because nanotechnologies emerge from many traditional industries. There is no entity that integrates and organizes the nanotechnology industry. Second, the health- and environmental risks of nanotechnologies are unclear. Companies therefore wait with adopting nanotechnology until the risks are clearer. Third, nanotechnology faces similar challenges like every new, emerging and science based industry in which the transfer from science to market needs to be bridged. To overcome these gaps for mass-market adoption of nanotechnology more understanding is necessary about why companies innovate, how this is organized and what tasks companies perform to innovate. The reason innovation occurs can be explained from the macro (societal) perspective and the micro (firm) perspective. On the macro level innovation is one of the three cornerstones in realizing societal growth. On the micro level companies innovate to stay competitive, adapt to technological developments, fulfil market needs and because of the shortening of product life cycles. The way innovation is organized differs per sector. Especially production intensive industries can benefit from general purpose and multi-applicable technology, because they control their own technical process and are in a continuous process of improving their activities to stay competitive. Fundamental parts of this process are; technology scouting and technical problem solving. Technology scouting is the process of finding technologies from external sources to solve technical problems or for new product development. Technical problem solving is a process that uses (engineering design) methods to structure a problem in a set of requirements and functions1. This problem can be solved by finding means2 that execute the function. Technology scouting together with technical problem solving are an iterative process of information retrieval and conceptualization. To retrieve information, companies use many sources. Patents and scientific literature are used to gain insight in the newest developments in science, technology and what competitors are doing. Due to the large amount and complex substance of these information sources, gaining insight is a time- consuming and costly process that not always renders useful results. To gain better insight in these large amounts of texts faster natural language processing (NLP) can be applied. This is a text-mining technique. Specifically, the SAO-based parsing method is an interesting NLP technique. SAO-parsing extracts the grammatical relation of the Subject (S), Action (A) and Object (O) from a sentence.