This study examined how green technology (GT) has evolved recently in the domain of national research and development (R&D) in Korea. The analysis considered social network analysis by using keywords of national R&D projects in environmentally benign (‘green’ in this paper) technologies. Data for analysis were collected from the R&D database of the National Science and Technology Information Service (NTIS). By selecting the official GT category in the NTIS’s database, we gathered 53,896 GT R&D projects from 2011 to 2016 inclusive. By constructing a co-occurrence matrix with keywords, we conducted a centrality analysis (including degree, closeness, betweenness centrality) and visualized the network matrix to display a cluster map. This study presents the following findings: (1) the chronical trends of GT R&D, (2) focused fields of GT R&D, (3) the relations between keywords and GTs, and (4) the characteristics and problems in GT R&D. The paper ends with suggested policy implications to boost national GT R&D and to develop GTs in the future.

This paper reviews the development of South Korea’s national research and development (R&D) in graphene technology, focusing on projects that have been classified as “green” technology. A total of 826 projects (USD 210 billion) from 2010 to 2019 were collected from the National Science and Technology Information Service (NTIS), which is full-cycle national R&D project management system in South Korea. Then we analyzed its R&D trend by conducting diverse text mining methods including frequency analysis, association rule mining, and topic modeling. The analysis suggests that the number of graphene green technology (GT) R&D projects and the research expenses will show a rising curve again in the incumbent government along with the implementation of the Korean New Deal policy, which integrates the Green New Deal and the Digital New Deal.