Advanced Methods: Technological Frontiers and Embeddings—A Visualization Approach

Scott W. Cunningham, Jan H. Kwakkel and Sertaç Oruç

Chapter 18 in Innovation Discovery:Network Analysis of Research and Invention Activity for Technology Management, 2018, pp 503-530 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: The chapter concerns the measurement and forecasting of technological change, a topic relevant to many high-tech organizations and their customers. We revisit recent and classic data sets from technology forecasting data envelopment analysis (TFDEA) research and technometrics in light of a new visualization technique known as t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). The technique is a nonlinear visualization technique for preserving local structure in high-dimensional spaces of data. The technique may be classified as a form of topological data analysis. Specifically, each point in the space represents a potential technological design or implementation, and each line segment in the space represents a local measure of technological improvement or degradation. We hypothesize six distinct kinds of performance development in technology within this space, including the frontier, the fold, the salient, the soliton, and the lock-in. Then we examine the spaces to determine which kinds of development are the best explanations for observed development. The technique is not extrapolative and therefore cannot fully supplant the existing technometric methods. Nonetheless the approach offers a useful diagnostic to the existing technometric methods and may help advance theories of technological development.

Keywords: Bibliometrics; Technology Management; Patents; Innovation; Scientometric; Network Analysis; Network Tools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781786344069_0018 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781786344069_0018 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

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:wsi:wschap:9781786344069_0018

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().