Indicators of technological emergence promise valuable intelligence to those determining R&D priorities. We present an implemented algorithm to calculate emergence scores for topical terms from abstract record sets. We offer a family of emergence indicators deriving from those scores. Primary emergence indicators identify “hot topic” terms. We then use those to generate secondary indicators that reflect organizations, countries, or authors especially active at frontiers in a target R&D domain. We also flag abstract records (papers or patents) rich in emergent technology content, and we score research fields on relative degree of emergence. This paper presents illustrative results for example topics – Nano-Enabled Drug Delivery, Non-Linear Programming, Dye Sensitized Solar Cells, and Big Data.
Author(s): Alan L. Porter, Jon Garner, Stephen F. Carley, Nils C. Newman Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology Source: Technological Forecasting and Social Change Year: 2018
Synthetic biology is an emerging domain that combines biological and engineering concepts and which has seen rapid growth in research, innovation, and policy interest in recent years. This paper contributes to efforts to delineate this emerging domain by presenting a newly constructed bibliometric definition of synthetic biology. Our approach is dimensioned from a core set of papers in synthetic biology, using procedures to obtain benchmark synthetic biology publication records, extract keywords from these benchmark records, and refine the keywords, supplemented with articles published in dedicated synthetic biology journals. We compare our search strategy with other recent bibliometric approaches to define synthetic biology, using a common source of publication data for the period from 2000 to 2015. The paper details the rapid growth and international spread of research in synthetic biology in recent years, demonstrates that diverse research disciplines are contributing to the multidisciplinary development of synthetic biology research, and visualizes this by profiling synthetic biology research on the map of science. We further show the roles of a relatively concentrated set of research sponsors in funding the growth and trajectories of synthetic biology. In addition to discussing these analyses, the paper notes limitations and suggests lines for further work.
Author(s): Philip Shapira, Seokbeom Kwon, Jan Youtie Organization(s): University of Manchester, Georgia Institute of Technology Source: Scientometrics Year: 2017
This study advances a four-part indicator for technical emergence. While doing so it focuses on a particular class of emergent concepts—those which display the ability to repeatedly maintain an emergent status over multiple time periods. The authors refer to this quality as staying power and argue that those concepts which maintain this ability are deserving of greater attention. The case study we consider consists of 15 subdatatsets within the dye-sensitized solar cell framework. In this study the authors consider the impact technical domain and scale have on the behavior of persistently emergent concepts and test which of these has a greater influence.
Author(s): Stephen F. Carley, Nils C. Newman, Alan L. Porter, Jon G. Garner Organization(s): Georgia Institute of Technology, Search Technology Source: Scientometrics Year: 2017
Historically, Technology Assessment (TA) refers to studying the societal effects of the development and application of a technology. A key challenge for modern TA is to assess emerging technology fields as they are emerging – this is crucial for producing actionable strategic intelligence for use in decision-making. To contribute to addressing this challenge, the aim of this research is to advance methods to generate effective technology assessment intelligence, and to showcase the approach with an application to the rapidly evolving field of “Big Data.” The key contributions of this paper are twofold: 1) Methodological: To advance the Forecasting Innovation Pathway (FIP) methodology to identify potential impacts of an emerging technology, and to gauge their likelihood and magnitude of importance for further study; 2) Substantive: To estimate the likelihood and importance of potential impacts of big data analytics (BDA) more broadly, and to help inform U.S. policy considerations in particular.
Author(s): Ying Guo, Jianhua Liu, Alan L. Porter Organization(s): Beijing Institute of Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Georgia Institute of Technology Source: Annual Conference on Big Data and Business Analytics (Shanghai, China) Year: 2017
