Abstract
The aim of this paper is to propose a new method to identify main paths in a technological domain using patent citations. Previous approaches for using main path analysis have greatly improved our understanding of actual technological trajectories but nonetheless have some limitations. They have high potential to miss some dominant patents from the identified main paths; nonetheless, the high network complexity of their main paths makes qualitative tracing of trajectories problematic. The proposed method searches backward and forward paths from the high-persistence patents which are identified based on a standard genetic knowledge persistence algorithm. We tested the new method by applying it to the desalination and the solar photovoltaic domains and compared the results to output from the same domains using a prior method. The empirical results show that the proposed method can dramatically reduce network complexity without missing any dominantly important patents. The main paths identified by our approach for two test cases are almost 10x less complex than the main paths identified by the existing approach. The proposed approach identifies all dominantly important patents on the main paths, but the main paths identified by the existing approach miss about 20% of dominantly important patents.
Highlights
Technological progress is a major factor enabling economic growth [1, 2]
This paper only considers knowledge flows within the technological domain, so only those patent citations occurring within the technological domain are considered (Fig 2)
Membrane desalination is based on the characteristics of semi-permeable membranes that permit water to pass through it when the pressure of feed water is greater than the osmotic pressure: reverse osmosis (RO) has been widely used for commercial purposes
Summary
Technological progress is a major factor enabling economic growth [1, 2]. Better understanding of technological change and innovation is essential for informing policy to enable sustainable economic and social growth. PV cells directly generate electricity from sunlight radiation and this PV effect was discovered over 150 years ago but has been practically developed from the 1950s [48]. The Solar PV domain can be broadly classified into three sub-components: solar cell, module and panel, and mounting system. The PV module (or panel) is a bundle of solar cells for practical applications, and mounting systems are related to technologies to install and control a PV system. Major bottlenecks in Solar PV are conversion efficiency and costs, so the overall developmental trajectory consists of inventions that, based on the basic PV effect, adopting new materials or develop new engineering designs for alleviating these bottlenecks. Thermal desalination is based on water phase changes through distillation or evaporation: Multi effect distillation, multi stage flash and vapor compression distillation are the most representative technologies. Thermal desalination accounts for a significant portion of the entire desalination market, rapid advancement of membrane desalination is apparently leading to it surpassing thermal desalination [52]: most patented inventions, in our patent set, are related to membrane desalination
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