Analyzing technology impact networks for R&D planning using patents: combined application of network approaches

Recently, national governments have tried to improve technology ecology, by formulating research and development (R&D) policies and investing in R&D programs. For strategically designed national R&D plans, analytic approaches that identify and assess the impact of each technology from short-term and long-term perspectives are necessary. Further, in methodological perspective, the approaches should be able to synthetically consider the most recent technological information, the direct and hidden impacts among technologies, and the relative impacts of the focal technology in globally-linked technological relationship from the overall perspective. However, most previous studies based patent citation networks are insufficient for these requirements. As a remedy, we present a combined approach for constructing a technology impact network and identifying the impact and intermediating capability of technology areas from the perspective of a national technology system. To construct and analyze the technology impact network, our method integrates three network techniques: patent co-classification (PCA), decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and social network analysis (SNA). The advantages of the proposed method are threefold. First, it identifies the directed technological knowledge flows from the most recent patents, by employing PCA. Second, the proposed network contains both the direct and indirect impacts among different technology areas, by applying the DEMATEL method. Third, using SNA, the method can analyze the characteristics of the technologies in terms of the comprehensive impacts and the potential brokerage capabilities. The method is illustrated using all of the recent Korean patents (58,279) in the United States patent database from 2008 to 2012. We expect that our method can be used to provide input to decision makers for effective R&D planning.