Abstract
Identification of prevalent problems is an important process of strategic innovation for stakeholders of trending technologies. This paper proposes a systematic and replicable method of patent analysis to identify problems to be solved requisite for sustainable technology planning and development, by implementing the concept of ‘context’ to facilitate problem identification. The main concept of the method entails the importance of the connections between contextual information and problems to provide more focused, relevant, and constructive insights essential for instating goals for research and development activities. These context–problem entities and their entwined connections are discovered using keyword pattern matching, grammar-based text mining, and co-word analysis techniques. The intermediary outputs are then utilized to generate the proposed context–problem network (CP net) for social network, grammar, and quantitative data analysis. For verification, our method was applied to 737 patents in the wireless energy transmission technology domain, successfully yielding CP net data. The detailed analysis of the resulting CP net data delivered meaningful information in the wireless charging technology field: The main contexts, “batteries”, “power transmission coils”, and “cores”, are found to be most relevant to the main problems, “maximizing coupling efficiency”, “minimizing DC signal components”, and “charging batteries”. The results provide a wide range of informative perspectives for individuals, the scientific community, corporate, and market-level stakeholders. Furthermore, the method of this study can be applicable to various technologies since it is independent of specific subject domains. Future research directions aim to improve this method for better quality and modeling of contexts and problems.
Highlights
Innovation commonly initiates when prevalent problems are accurately identified
We report a systematic and replicable method of patent analysis to identify key contexts and problems to be solved for sustainable technology development and management
We developed the systematic and replicable method of patent analysis as an identification tool of contexts and problems to be solved in patents
Summary
Innovation commonly initiates when prevalent problems are accurately identified. For effective innovative endeavors, an innovator must define the currently existing problems and select which of them to prioritize and focus on. We report a systematic and replicable method of patent analysis to identify key contexts and problems to be solved for sustainable technology development and management. This method is composed of context–problem network (CP net) generation and quantitative analysis (Figure 1). Due to the eclectic natures of these segments of patents, each sentence has a different purpose and meaning, despite being in the same section This underlying fact alone provides adequate reason for identifying the sentences that describe the problem, prior to conducting grammar-based methods to the text. The most relatable research developed far involved the extraction methods of problems [19,20], the contexts of the problems were not considered
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