The Center for Research and Development Strategy (CRDS) has introduced concepts of new industrial categories of "Umbrella Industry" and "Element Industry" and developed methods to formulate research and development strategies to strengthen global competitiveness of industries in a more elaborative manner.
We have defined the "Umbrella Industry" as an industry that produces a system to generate significant values not only in inter-industry relations but also in social and economic perspectives by building a large system of added values through combination of parts and materials as a system or combination of such hardware technologies and software technologies to demonstrate optimum functions as a total system and call a product produced by the umbrella industry as an "Umbrella System." On the other hand, we decided to call parts and materials that are incorporated into the umbrella system as components and highly independent software technologies as an "Element System" and defined the industry to produce such system as the "Element Industry."

The CRDS proposes not to follow the measures to comprehensively strengthen part and materials industries centering on part and material industries with strong global competitiveness that Japan boasts, but to seek a method for visualization of R&D strategies by targeting the umbrella industry, which is a high value-added industry, uncovering specific research and development issues that are necessary to realize it, introducing and promoting temporal axes to solve these issues. According to this method, we can formulate R&D strategies to induce science and technology innovation and open innovation in a systematic and generation-to-generation developmental manner both in the "CRDS Umbrella Industry" and the element industry to be induced by realizing it.
We have defined that the "CRDS umbrella industry" meets the following four criteria and created a "Bird'S Eye View of Industrial Technologies to Formulate R&D Strategies that Induce Science and Technology Innovation" with the "CRDS Umbrella Industry" created based on these criteria as a horizontal axis and the "Element Industry" as a vertical axis.

1. Oriented to solve global environmental problems
2. Science and technology innovation is required to create that industry
3. Social and economic values are significant and can make a great contribution to improving Japan's GDP
4. Japan is positioned in a globally superior position to create it with the potential and expectations from the world

The CRDS umbrella industry is divided mainly into two areas. One is a "New Industry Aiming to Create High-Added Values Based on the Element Industry with Strong International Competitiveness that Japan Boasts" and the other is an "Essential Industry as Living and Social Basis although the Relationship with International Competitiveness is Now Remote." In the industrial classification, the former is classified into energy industry, resource development industry, environmental industry, information and communication industry and transportation industry. In this area, 28 CRDS umbrella industries were created. The latter is classified into food industry, medical industry, construction industry and education industry. In this area, 9 CRDS umbrella industries were created.