Category Archives: Research Examples

S-Curve analysis and technology life cycle. Application in series of data of articles and patents

CTI, Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples

In this article, the methodology of curves in S is applied in series of data on articles in Biotechnology and Nanotechnology since 1956 obtained from the ISI Web of Science and of patents since 1962 (year of priority) and 1970 (year of publication). Belonging to controlled release, of the medical context, the data was obtained from a Tech Mining approach using the Vantage Point software tool. With the accumulated data, in time, nonlinear regression was achieved and the inflection point in the two series was calculated, taking into account the statistical parameters like Fitted R2, Value T, Value P, and Durbin Watson. The data of the articles and patents were analyzed under the following models: Weibull, Gompertz, Logistic and Sigmodial, among others, for a total of 13 models analyzed. The models with the best fit in the inflection point were selected. In the series of data from the articles, one of the models that had the best fit was the Sigmoidal model. The Sigmoidal model contained three parameters which generated a value of 33.4 for the inflection point for the year of the studied series. With the obtained values for the inflection points in the series of articles and patents, the uncertainty can be reduced in the making of decisions about the Technology Life Cycle (TLC), especially in the following aspects: the identification of the kind of technology (before and after of the inflection point), the determination of the suitable moment to apply technological rights and intellectual property, and the establishment of strategies for monitoring (when the technology is emerging) and investment.

Full-text available at http://www.revistaespacios.com/a16v37n07/16370719.html

Author(s): Jhon Wilder ZARTHA Sossa; Fernando PALOP Marro; Bibiana ARANGO Alzate; Fabián Mauricio VELEZ Salazar; and Andres Felipe AVALOS Patiño
Organization(s): Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana,  Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Source: Espacios
Year: 2015

A selected literature review on the changing role of stakeholders as value creators

Research Examples

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the changing role of stakeholders in value creation since the inception of literature on stakeholders and sustainability from 1984 and 1987, respectively until 2015 and to understand interrelationships among key terms of stakeholder and sustainability literature. We explore the changing role of stakeholders as a source of value creation through extensive literature review by adopting text mining approach. VantagePoint is the tool used to facilitate text mining literature of sustainability and stakeholder and related literature from 1984 to 2015.

Findings
This paper reveals that the major trends in firm’s approach towards stakeholders has changed over the years from demonstration of compliance in 1984-1994, safeguarding of reputation from 1994 to 2004, to finally co-creating value with stakeholders from the period of 2004-2014.

Research limitations/implications
There have been extensive literature reviews done on stakeholder and sustainability literature, but only few have studied the integration of stakeholder and sustainability literature. This paper has used a novel approach, i.e. VantagePoint software to analyse the sustainability and stakeholder literature.

Originality/value
The changing role of stakeholders as a value creator have provided new research avenues in value creation process. The emerging challenge that firms now face is to co-create sustainable value by engaging both internal and external stakeholders.

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/WJSTSD-01-2016-0002

Author(s): Shridhar M Samant and Shirish Sangle
Organization(s): National Institute of Industrial Engineering
Source: World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development
Year: 2016

Big Data in the Social Sciences

Citation analysis, Research Examples, Research profiling

Recent emerging technology policies seek to diminish negative impacts while equitably and responsibly accruing and distributing benefits.  Social scientists play a role in these policies, but relatively little quantitative research has been performed to study how social scientists inform the assessment of emerging technologies. This paper addresses this gap by examining social science research on “Big Data” – an emerging technology of wide interest. This paper analyzes a dataset of fields extracted from 488 social science and humanities papers written about Big Data. Our focus is on understanding the multi-dimensional nature of societal assessment by examining the references upon which these papers draw. We find that eight sub-literatures are important in framing social science research about Big Data. These results indicate that the field is evolving from general sociological considerations toward applications issues and privacy concerns. Implications for science policy and technology assessment of societal implications are discussed.

Preprint available at http://works.bepress.com/jan_youtie/80/

Author(s): Jan Youtie and Alan Porter
Organizations: Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: Science and Public Policy
Year: 2016

Global patent analysis of power lithium-ion battery separator

Data Type, Patents, Research Examples, Research profiling, Research Type

The development of technologies related to power lithium-ion battery separator has been taken place in recent years. In order to provide appropriate decision references for the industry development, patent analysis was carried out. On the basis of Derwent Innovation Index (DII), global patents related to power lithium-ion battery separator were analyzed from aspects of global development scale and trend, technology fields, geographic distribution, top assignees. The findings show that power lithium-ion battery separator industry has entered fast-growth stage. In branch technology fields, raw materials are the priority research and development (R&D) areas of power lithium-ion battery separator. Japan has applied for a large number of patents and occupied the leading position. Asahi Kasei Chemicals Corporation, Toray industries, Tonen Chemical Corporation possess strategic advantages over other enterprises in the current competitive situation of international separator market.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7385791&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D7385791

Author(s): Na Li; Quan Guan ; Siming Tan ; Yunfei Wang ; Zhiyong Chu ; Jin Liu
Organization(s): Qingdao Institute of Science & Tech. Inf.
Source: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM)
Year: 2015

Subject–action–object-based morphology analysis for determining the direction of technological change

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, Research Type, Tech mining,

Morphology analysis, despite being a strong stimulus for the development of new alternatives, largely relies on domain experts and neglects the relationships between keywords in the construction of morphological structures. In addition, there are few systematic approaches to prioritize the morphological configurations. To address these issues, a hybrid approach is proposed, which enhances the performance of morphology analysis by combining it with subject–action–object (SAO) semantic analysis. Initially, a keyword co-occurrence patent set for subsequent SAO analysis is prepared based on keywords frequency vector analysis. Then, SAO structures are extracted and semantic analysis is performed to identify the relationships between keywords, which help to build morphological structures more objectively. In addition, a well-defined evaluation system that contains eight sub-indexes is proposed to evaluate the morphological configurations. Finally, to demonstrate and validate the proposed approach, the dye-sensitized solar cells technology is employed as the case study. Results indicate that the most promising combination we predict appears frequently in 2012–2014 and the distribution of it is also close to the fact in 2012–2014. Accordingly, the proposed method can be used to effectively determine the direction of technological change and to forecast technology innovation opportunities.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162516000299

Author(s): Junfang Guo, Xuefeng Wang, Qianrui Li, Donghua Zhu
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Year: 2016

The study of systems and methods for scientometric analysis of scientific publications

Research Examples

This paper provides an overview of the methods and systems that are applied for scientometric analysis of scientific publications. Methods to identify promising research directions are described. The results of an experimental study aimed at determining the directions of scientific research within the subject area of “regenerative medicine” by using various methods are presented. Conclusions are made about the prospects and shortcomings of the applied methods. Directions for further research are proposed.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.3103/S0147688215050068

Author(s): A. V. Shvets, D. A. Devyatkin, I. V. Smirnov, I. A. Tikhomirov, K. V. Popov, K. N. Yarygin
Organization(s): Russian Academy of Sciences
Source: Scientific and Technical Information Processing
Year: 2015

Topic analysis and forecasting for science, technology and innovation: Methodology with a case study focusing on big data research

CTI, Funding, Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples,

Highlights

  • Data-driven clustering approach to group topics with high accuracy
  • Similarity measure approach to trace the interaction between topics in time series
  • Analyzing changes of TFIDF values of related topics to predict future trends
  • Technology Roadmapping to blend historical analysis and expert-based forecasting

The number and extent of current Science, Technology & Innovation topics are changing all the time, and their induced accumulative innovation, or even disruptive revolution, will heavily influence the whole of society in the near future. By addressing and predicting these changes, this paper proposes an analytic method to (1) cluster associated terms and phrases to constitute meaningful technological topics and their interactions, and (2) identify changing topical emphases. Our results are carried forward to present mechanisms that forecast prospective developments using Technology Roadmapping, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies. An empirical case study of Awards data from the United States National Science Foundation, Division of Computer and Communication Foundation, is performed to demonstrate the proposed method. The resulting knowledge may hold interest for R&D management and science policy in practice.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162516000160

Author(s): Yi Zhang, Guangquan Zhang, Hongshu Chen, Alan L. Porter, Donghua Zhu, Jie Lu
Organization(s): University of Technology Sydney, Georgia Institute of Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology
Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Year: 2016

BIBLIOMETRICAL ANALYSIS OF YANGTZE RESEARCH BASED ON WEB OF SCIENCE FROM 1900 TO 2012

Research Examples, Research profiling

In order to reveal the Yangtze research’s hotspot and development, we chose Web of Science as the data source, using the bibliometric method and Thomson Data Analyzer (TDA), and conducted a quantitative analysis on the number of published papers, countries, institutions, authors, journals, subjects and keywords. The result shows that (1) the Yangtze research could be divided into three stages, i.e., the initial development period, the exploration period and the rapid development period. (2) China published the most papers of Yangtze research, the main foreign countries and institutions come from the United States, Japan, and Australia. (3) Chinese Academy of Science is the major institution for Yangtze research. (4) Domestic and international concerns rest ongeology, environmental science, water resource and meteorology.

Author(s): PENG Nai-zhu, ZHONG Yong-heng
Organization(s): Chinese Academy of Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
Source: RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT IN THE YANGTZE BASIN 2015
Year: 2015

Chinese energy and fuels research priorities and trend: A bibliometric analysis

Research Examples, Research profiling, ST&I policy

This study aims to summarize an overview of Chinese energy and fuels research using comprehensive bibliometric analysis measures based on data extracted from the Science Citation Index Expanded database from 1993 to 2012. Keyword analysis was used to assess and evaluate the priorities, topics and topic shifts using the Thomson Data Analyzer (TDA). In particular, popular topics were demonstrated using bubble charts. The results show that solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen were the most important topics. The priorities of energy and fuels research in China were hydrogen and fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries, biodiesel and biomass, coal, and solar energy, respectively. Of course, lithium-ion batteries have entered substantive application stages in China in 2012. The hydrogen economy has been formed. Biomass and biodiesel research was the popular topic, as well as hydrogen and fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries. But solar energy was not still “hot”. The characteristics of the types of documents, languages, year, journals, institutions and co-publishing countries were analyzed, as well as the keyword occurrence frequencies. It can be stated that 19,089 articles by Chinese authors were published in 106 journals. More than one-third of the articles were published in the Journal of Power Sources, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and Bioresource Technology. The Chinese Academy of Science, Tsinghua University, China University of Petroleum, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Zhejiang University were the top five institutions. The USA was the leading inter-collaborative country, followed by Japan, the UK and Canada. The findings presented here provide an overall picture of the development of Chinese energy and fuels research and could also help policy makers assess the impact of the resource allocation decisions made in the past to develop energy policies and strategies for the future.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032115016226

Author(s): Hua-Qi Chen, Xiuping Wang, Li He, Ping Chen, Yuehua Wan, Lingyun Yang, Shuian Jiang
Organization(s): Taizhou University, Zhejiang University
Source: Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews
Year: 2015

Semantic-Based Technology Trend Analysis

Future-oriented technology analysis, Research Examples, ST&I indicators, Tech mining,

Technology trend analysis offers a flexible instrument to understand both opportunity and competition for emerging technologies. Semantic information is used in Science, Technology & Innovation (ST&I) records which makes the technology trend analysis more challenging. This paper proposes a semantic-based approach for technology trend analysis through emphasizing Subject-Action-Object (SAO) structure, It also applies the trend analysis approach to extract technology information and identify and predict the trend of technology development more effectively. An empirical study on Graphene is completed to demonstrate the proposed trend analysis approach.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=7383052&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D7383052

Author(s): Yang, Chao ; Zhu, Donghua ; Zhang, Guangquan
Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology, University of Technology Sydney
Source:  2015 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE)
Year: 2015