Abstract
With the strategic importance of discerning opportunities and threats from technological development to achieve sustainable competitiveness, exploring technological trends becomes critical for a successful technology strategy in logistics. Given the rapid pace of development and varying technological options, logistics also increasingly requires methodological support and appropriate data to reduce the complexity and burden of exploring technology trends. While previous research has largely relied on experts’ insights, the value of patent-based approaches for exploring technological trends has been underestimated in logistics. To address this gap, this study proposes a topic modeling-based approach using logistics-related patents registered at the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO). The core of the suggested approach is latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), allowing the identification of logistics-related technological topics behind patents. The topics identified by LDA are further investigated regarding both filed-level and firm-level trends. The suggested approach is expected to offer implications of the use of patents for the purpose of exploring the trends of technology development outside the organization in logistics. In addition, we believe that the information on the technological topics and their trends generated by the suggested approach can offer an enhanced understanding of the technological landscape in logistics.
Highlights
Due to the easing of trade barriers and the introduction of developed technologies, logistics has become a strategical concern and a key for companies to develop sustainable competitive advantages [1,2,3]
The research question that this study aims to address by this step is: what technological areas have been developed in logistics? To this end, this study performs latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to identify k major topics in logistics-related patents
The analysis results showed that the assignees in the logistic-related patents were from different industrial fields and there was no dominant United States Patent Classification Systems (USPC) class, thereby confirming the advantage of our approach to targeting patent data for investigating technological trends in logistics
Summary
Due to the easing of trade barriers and the introduction of developed technologies, logistics has become a strategical concern and a key for companies to develop sustainable competitive advantages [1,2,3]. One of the critical factors making logistics a source of differentiation is technology [4,5], and this role is gaining more significance and diversity with recent developments in technology [6] It is well-recognized that the appropriate use of technologies can enhance the core function of logistics [7,8], as well as create new business models in logistics [9,10]. Leading companies like Amazon use these data to identify demand patterns and implement anticipatory shipping [13] These technologies can reduce the uncertainty involved in complex supply chains and fast-changing markets [14]. Where customers have multiple options to interact with firms and need a seamlessly integrated experience [49], logistics operations become complex and such roles are increasingly important to customer satisfaction and company performance [17]
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