Technology opportunity discovery under the dynamic change of focus technology fields: Application of sequential pattern mining to patent classifications

Jaewoong Choi, Byeongki Jeong and Janghyeok Yoon

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2019, vol. 148, issue C

Abstract: Technology opportunity discovery (TOD), have evolved over time from technology forecasting to an approach based on existing technology capabilities for increased practicality. Unfortunately, TOD studies are still lacking, in that they do not consider the unique direction of the target firm in technology development or the recent trends of technological fields. Consequently, this paper proposes an improved methodology for identifying technology opportunities with less uncertainty by focusing on the target firm's dynamic change of focus technology fields. The proposed approach is as follows: 1) generate a sequence database, containing firms' dynamic change of focus technology fields; 2) explore the frequent sequential patterns from a precedence enterprise (PE) sequence database using the PrefixSpan algorithm to identify the technology candidates from a PE sequence similar with that of the target firm; and 3) evaluate the candidates on technological similarity, business stability, and recency. The results of the proposed approach are expected to help firms discover appropriate technology opportunities by considering both their existing technological capacities and the dynamic change of their focus technology fields. Furthermore, the proposed approach can identify the most appropriate technology opportunities with less uncertainty in real-life business environments by evaluating technological similarity, business stability, and recency.

Keywords: Technology opportunity discovery; Sequential pattern mining; Uncertainty; Technology intelligence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162518312745
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:148:y:2019:i:c:s0040162518312745

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119737

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().