The Emerging Clusters Model: A tool for identifying emerging technologies across multiple patent systems

Abstract

Emerging technologies are of great interest to a wide range of stakeholders, but identifying such technologies is often problematic, especially given the overwhelming amount of information available to analysts and researchers on many subjects. This paper describes the Emerging Clusters Model, which uses advanced patent citation techniques to locate emerging technologies in close to real time, rather than retrospectively. The model covers multiple patent systems, and is designed to be extensible to additional systems. This paper also describes the first large scale test of the Emerging Clusters Model. This test reveals that patents in emerging clusters consistently have a significantly higher impact on subsequent technological developments than patents outside these clusters. Given that these emerging clusters are defined as soon as a given time period ends, without the aid of any forward-looking information, this suggests that the Emerging Clusters Model may be a useful tool for identifying interesting new technologies as they emerge.