Modeling and analyzing technology innovation in the energy sector: Patent-based HMM approach

Abstract

Energy is essential for global economy. To satisfy the huge demand for energy in an environmentally friendly manner, it will be imperative to develop new technologies for using renewable and sustainable energy. As a result, R&D efforts in the energy sector have been increasing and effective investment in promising and emerging technologies has become necessary. However, despite these efforts, few studies have tried to investigate the characteristics of energy technologies in their innovation processes, though such investigations will be helpful in developing innovation strategies in the energy sector. Therefore, this study will focus on modeling trends and patterns of innovation in the energy sector and on analyzing the characteristics of energy innovation in terms of technologies. For the purpose of analysis, the USPTO patent database is utilized, and using this database, the growth trends of technologies are modeled based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Finally, the modeling results are applied to energy technology management by the clustering of technologies or countries with similar growth patterns. The results indicate that the growth of energy technology can be modeled by seven stages in the global trends and five in the Korean trends. When particularly focusing on fuel cell technology, its innovation patterns in Korea are found to be similar to those in the UK and Taiwan. Energy technologies in Korea have advance greatly recently, which show different growth patterns compared to those in the global trends and other countries. In the future, more co-development activities with other countries are encouraged to acquire original technologies with high marketability, through the particularly of Korean innovation should be emphasized. These research findings will facilitate the exploration of energy technologies and their country-specific characteristics, which will likely support better strategy- and policy-making in the energy sector.