Abstract
Technology opportunity discovery (TOD) is an important technique to help fuel cell vehicle (FCV) firms keep market advantage and sustainable development. Under fierce competition in the new energy industry, there is an urgent necessity for innovative TOD methods to effectively identify technology opportunities for FCV firms. This study proposes a structured TOD framework with a multi-level identification process. Based on technology portfolio analysis, it fully integrates the firm’s technology level analysis, technology potential analysis and patent novelty analysis. A series of techniques such as LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation), MDS (multidimensional scaling) and LOF (local outlier factor) are also applied in the framework. A total of 14,858 granted patent data of the FCV industry containing 798 patents of the target firm were extracted from the Derwent Innovation Index database as the input data of the empirical study. The result shows that the framework can provide a more profound analysis for identifying technology opportunities, which offer more appropriate insights in both strategic and operational level technological decisions for technology-oriented firms.
Highlights
Increasing awareness of environmental pollution and the growing energy crisis have spurred the interests of automobile industries in developing new energy alternatives [1]
We propose a systematic technology opportunity discovery (TOD) framework with a multi-level process to identify technology opportunities and select a proper R&D direction for fuel cell vehicle (FCV) firms
The basic assumption is that documents are mixtures of latent topics, wherein each topic is a distribution of words
Summary
Increasing awareness of environmental pollution and the growing energy crisis have spurred the interests of automobile industries in developing new energy alternatives [1]. Due to the increase of social demands on advanced technology and the enhancement of industrial competition, FCV firms intensively require new promising technology that has the potential to sustainably secure their competitiveness and development. To this end, technology opportunity discovery (TOD) has been employed to deal with this problem. Making technology development decisions based on proper and practical technology opportunities often leads to a a more efficient R&D process while reducing the risk level of R&D investment [11,12] Given these advantages, TOD plays a vital role in FCV firm’s strategic R&D decisions as well as their sustainable development
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