## 1 Introduction  
The industrial environment is currently experiencing its fourth revolution, which means as the individual needs of customers vary rapidly, product manufacturing and market strategic planning need to be adjusted in time according to changes in the situation [1]. To have a better position in the competitive market or have consumer preference, companies continually develop innovative technology and look for better products to launch for consumers [2]. Technology roadmap (TRM) is a useful technique to support and plan technology management and to link technology and product developments to business goals and market opportunities, which are tactics often employed by large companies [3]. According to a survey conducted in 1999 by UK manufacturers, approximately 10% of medium to large manufacturing firms in the UK have employed roadmapping [4], and this has now clearly increased. A large amount of R&D capital and efforts were poured to encourage creation, such as through TRM, having been put forth by large firms to continuously generate new technology and products. Nevertheless, these investigation activities normally require an amount of manpower and material resources that is too great for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) [5]. Another factor that becomes the obstacle for the use of the TRM approach is the shortage of appropriate input data on markets, competitors and technology, as such data often depends on knowledge connected by experts in forums and conference. Thus, suitable and effective knowledge management, as well as technology and product planning are becoming ever more essential to increase the economic profit, market share and technological status of a company. To improve the capacity of SMEs to capture new opportunities in future markets, technology and products, the attributes of sustainability and low costs need to be considered preferentially in R&D management. As a widely used technique in R&D management, TRM is beneficial for organizations to plan their technologies by explaining the technologies, products, services and markets, which are the four layers obtained from previous studies. Each layer has its specific characteristics; for example, the market layer in the top is relative to trends of market, current needs of customers and potential customers, and it contains information on future development. In the middle, the service and product layers are related to the current service and functions and promising functions of products that customers need. At the bottom, the technology layer is related to the crucial information on trends of technology and issues of future [6; 7]. Multiple previous studies on TRMs presented modified methodologies based on two perspectives: qualitative analysis, such as Delphi [8], morphology analysis (MA) [4; 9; 10] and the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) [11]; and quantitative analysis, such as association rule mining [7] and Bayesian networks [12]. [PERSON] et al. [4] proposed the concept of MA-based TRMs to support planning and forecasting in SMEs with the criterion of data availability and tractability. [PERSON] et al. [9] proposed a methodology integrating MA with Delphi to refine the analysis results with the aim of providing good quality results for companies. Thus, the application of integrating MA in TRMs has been conducted widely in previous studies. Since TRM development needs professionals' support in fields of analysis and features of TRMs lie in the decomposition of the opportunities into four layers, the use of MA methodology becomes noticeable with other technology forecasting (TF) techniques [4; 9]. The MA method aims to reconstruct the target subject broken down for exploring new structures [13]. The essence of MA is to analyze the target subject visually and derive novel ideas systematically, so it has the potential to be integrated with TRMs.