Use of news and patent mining to identify companies with growth potential

Abstract

Introduction. Enterprise decision-makers can use news media to help guide investment decisions, and patents are publicly available documents describing research and development outputs. This work sought to leverage the information extracted from news articles and patent documents to identify companies holding patents about emerging technologies. This helped to pinpoint the companies with growth potential. Method. We used text mining techniques to extract hot terms for novel technologies and products from news articles and patent documents to identify the supply chain companies holding patent portfolios in emerging technologies. Analysis. We identified eighteen public companies in the supply chain of the automotive industry in Taiwan. The data envelopment analysis-based Malmquist productivity index was adopted to evaluate their relative performance growth over time. Results. The experimental results show that most of the companies identified by the proposed method had promising growth potential. Conclusions. The results of this research indicate that the supply chain companies identified by the hot terms in news articles and patent documents possessed development potential. This could assist decision-makers in planning investment strategies.