Application technology opportunity discovery from technology portfolios: Use of patent classification and collaborative filtering

Youngjin Park and Janghyeok Yoon

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2017, vol. 118, issue C, 170-183

Abstract: Technology opportunity discovery (TOD), customized to a firm's current technology capability, can be a good starting point to formulate a technology strategy for a firm that lacks technology information, experts, and/or facilities. Although patent-based studies have suggested systematic methods for customized TOD, these methods have limitations such as insufficient consideration of a target firm's technology portfolio and difficulty of method reproducibility due to expert intervention-based text mining. Therefore, this paper proposes an approach to determine application technology opportunities customized to a target firm by applying collaborative filtering to firms' technology portfolios, which are represented as a set of patent classification codes of the firm's patents. The proposed method involves 1) structuring technology portfolios as firm-international patent classification (IPC) distribution vectors using main group-level IPC codes of the applicants' patents, 2) recommending main group-level IPCs untapped by the target firm and with high preference scores by using collaborative filtering, and 3) classifying the recommended IPCs for the firm's strategic decision-making support using indexes of heterogeneity, growth rate, and competition level. To show the workings of this approach, we applied it to a high-tech firm with wireless communication technology, building on the analysis of large-scale patents and their applicants. This approach is expected to contribute to the systematic identification of application technology opportunities customized to firms and across various industries, and to become a basis for developing future technology intelligence systems.

Keywords: Application technology opportunity; Technological portfolio; Technology planning; Patent mining; Collaborative filtering; Patent classification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:118:y:2017:i:c:p:170-183

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2017.02.018

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