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/ The 4th International Seville Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA):12 & 13 May 2011
FTA and Grand Societal Challenges:
Shaping and Driving Structural and Systemic Transformations
How to Anticipate Opportunities around Technologies. Tech-mining study of emerging technologies in two practical cases: waste recycling and non-woven sectors.
Authors: / Rosa MªErnesto
Fernando Palop3
Sponsors: / Departamento de Industria, Innovación, comercio y turismo- Basque Government- Programa SAIOTEK
Type: / Two technologiesFTA exercise
Geographic Coverage: / World
Scope: / Waste recycling and non-woven sectors. Opportunities Early Identification, Innovation tools, Patent analysis, Tech-mining, Technology Management
Applied Methods: / Patent analysis, Tech-mining
Evaluation: Impacts: / The objectives have been meet in a seventy percent
New method to detect emergent technologies. Promote the innovation. Plan and allocate R&D resources.
Organiser: / 1University of the Basque Country, calle Nieves Cano 12, SP-01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
2University of the Basque Country, Almed. Urquijo s/n, SP-48030 Bilbao, Spain
3Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n, SP-46022 Valencia, Spain
Duration: / 2010-11 / Budget: / 44966,48 e / Time Horizon: / 2012 / Date of Brief: / 31/03/ 2011
Keywords: / Opportunities Early Identification, Innovation tools, Patent analysis, Tech-mining, Technology Management
Purpose
Main purpose is the development of new methods to discover patterns that follow the new technologies and the paths to convert them into opportunities for innovation. This briefing moving towards understanding the mechanism by which innovations are generated and shows a methodology to identify future technology opportunities based on text mining of scientific and technological databases. Assisting in priority or agenda-setting particularly the method could be useful for technology managers and corporate decisors in order to plan and allocate R&D resources.
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Background & Context
Analysis of new technologies has been of interest along many years. The increase incidence of disruptive innovations and scientific researches in recent years is driving institutions and also companies to scale down future technology analyses methodologies. However, it is necessary to develop some methods to discover patterns that follow these technologies. Thus, will be possible to convert them into opportunities for innovation as an essential support to maintain competitiveness on the long term.
Scientify databases and specifically Patents databases are generally regarded as precursors of future or ongoing technological developments. Therefore, its analysis should identify certain technology gaps that potentially could be transformed into opportunities.
Against this background the project “How to anticipate opportunities around technologies” is moving towards understandings the mechanism by which innovations are generated and will show a methodology to identify future technological opportunities based on text mining of scientific and technological databases.
This FTA exercise was designed and launched in a context of a need to foster and accelerate innovation outcomes from scientific and technological efforts. The process has an empirical basis on papers and patents production and upon that is open to be enriched by expert’s feedback.At the current time, the monitor of new technologies depend on a combination of quantitative analyse with the expertise knowledge.
How to anticipate opportunities around technologies extend FTA analyse to two industrial sectors. In this sense two tracks has been followed to develop the methodology working with data from two different technological fields in order to compare and validate results. The waste recycling technologies and the technologies about “non wovens” textiles and its applications. The thread that drives this research is the selected two technologies and after generalization.
The exercise is based on Tech-Mining methodological background.
The project is running from 2010 until the end of 2012
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FTA Process
The exercise deal with opportunities identification upon articles and patent information. The project team is establishing upon researchers from the Industrial Engineering and Management Departments of two Technical Universities under the leadership of the main researcher PhD. Rio and the collaboration of two R&D Centres. First users of this research are the R&D Centres that collaborated. The time horizon eill be the year 2012, but in order to manage there is plan reports every final year. Thus, our FTA exercise is divided in two phases.
In Phase I, the technologies were defined in order to analyse the scientific and research knowledge and draw the landscape using the knowledge inside articles and patents databases. We use Tech-Mining in the first step and after we apply cross-correlation matrix and Principal Component Analyses (PCA). We get as results visualizations of the technology sectors where it is possible to determinate gaps around technologies.
In Phase II, we will use qualitative techniques in order to value assess the potential in terms of emerging technology gaps found. Based on these results the interaction with the experts on the interim results (“bottom-up”) will drive the identification of potential opportunities.
The two R&D Centres were aware on the projects targets and contribute upon request. This will be a key role particularly in the opportunities characterization last phase.
Different previous works in this field were considered (see references).
Methodological approach
Scientific databases and specifically patents databases are generally regarded as precursors of technological developments. Therefore, its analysis should identify the technological gaps that can be converted into opportunities. In this sense, two tracks have been followed to develop the methodology of working with data from two different technological fields: the waste recycling sector, the non-woven textiles and its applications in order to compare and validate results.
The foresight method developed in this analysis is innovative because it combines qualitativeknowledge and quantitative data allowing the conclusions from the individual analysis toconverge into a variety of industrial scenarios.
It retrieves and downloads the information on these two sectors using the Derwent Patents and Environmental Abstracts databases. The downloaded information is analyzed using text mining techniques. In recent years text mining has been an expanding area. The introduction of natural language techniques that use semantic algorithms combined with the most advanced statistical techniques such as multivariate analysis or cluster analysis have become powerful tools for discovering and visualizing the knowledge of the entire scientific literature. In this case we use text- mining in the first step, and after we apply a cross-correlation matrix and the Principal Component Analyses (PCA). As a result we get visualizations of the technology sectors where it is possible to determinate gaps in technologies. Later we will use qualitative techniques in order to assess the potential in terms of emerging technology gaps found.
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How to Anticipate Opportunities around Technologies
Output & Impacts
The phase I of the project has been completed; the outcome is disseminate as a paper to the international community and where analyze of waste recycling sector is showed.
By the time, the main finding to identify new technologies in waste recycling what can be utilized by innovative companies. Thus, it has been necessary to develop the co-ocurrence between the descriptor field and the New -Year in which the descriptor appears by first time. We can appreciate the new terms in 2009 such us “detritivores” or “allelopathy”. These terms, that we can call weak signals, only has appear once or two times. In general it would be necessary to focus in the new term which happens in the records published in the last five years.
In this paper we present a comprehensive method for anticipating technological opportunities. Furthermore when will be finish, we´ll have applied our method with two practical cases from the waste recycling and non-woven sectors. With these examples we want to provide a proof of the concept on how to anticipate opportunities with this suggested method.
Results of phase provide evidence of the proposed methods as appropriate tools to forecast emerging technologies.
During phase II, will be necessary to validate the methodology it could be applied to any sector of the art and could therefore be of great value for companies and other organizations with a high innovative component.
The method could be particularly useful for technology managers and corporate decisors in order to plan and allocate R&D resources. Government and regional development agencies could also use it and benefit in their Innovation policies and planning decisions.
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How to Anticipate Opportunities around Technologies
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Outcome & Evaluation
At this stage, only half of the project has been completed. At the end of phase I we have a methodology based in techmining to detect the new and emergent technologies in one industrial sector. However in many cases new technologies are a necessary but not a sufficient factor for successful innovations. A wide range of non-technical factors are relevant as well (demand, regulations….). For an successful implementation will be necessary to identify the innovation pathways.
The results of phase I indicate that is possible to determinate some emergent technologies but in a second step, an advance in research would involve the participation of experts in the field of Waste recycling and non-woven textiles who can assess the articles in terms of newly found references. The opinion of the experts about the potential impact of newly identified terms on current technologies will allow us to determine the most innovative areas of work.
Our FTA analyse could support to decision making thought understanding how the innovations are generating and then, enable them to anticipate and address identified challenges and emerging weak signals.
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Sources and References
Cozzens, S.; Gatchair, S.; Kang, J.; Kim, K.; Lee, H.J. ; Ordoñez, G.; Porter, A. 2010. Emerging Technologies: quantitative identification and measurement. Technology Analysis &Strategic Management 22 (3): 361-376.
Belver, R.; Carrasco, E. 2006.Tools for strategic business decisions: Technology maps, The 4th International Scientific Conference “Business and Management”. The14th International Scientifi Conference “ Enterprise Management: Diagnosis, Strategy, Efficiency”. Vilnius, Lithuania 5-6 October. Selected Papers. Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Publishing House “Technika”, 2007, 299-303. ISBN:978-9955-28-114-6
Huang, L.; Porter, A.; Guo, Y. 2009. Exploring aSystematic Technology Forecasting Approach for New & Emerging Sciences & Technologies: A CaseStudy of Nano-enhanced Biosensors, in Proceedingsof the Atlanta Conference on Science andInnovation Policy. Georgia Tech Univ, USA.Atlanta, US, 2–3 October.
Igami, M. 2008. Exploration of the Evolution ofNanotechnology via Mapping of PatentApplications, Scientometrics 77(2): 289–308.doi:10.1007/s11192-007-1973-8
Lee, S.; Yoon, B.; Park, Y. 2009. An Approach toDiscovering New Technology Opportunities:Keyword-based Patent Map Approach,Technovation 29: 481–497.
doi:10.1016/j.technovation.2008.10.006
Porter, A.; Newman, N. 2011. Mining external R&D, Technovation 31 (4): 171-176.
Porter, A.; Achoeneck, D.; Frey, P. 2007. Mining theInternet for competitive technical intelligence,Competitive Intelligence Magazine 10(5): 24–28.
Porter, A.; Kongthon, A.; Chyi, L. 2002. Research Profiling: Improving the Literature Review, Scientometrics 53 (3): 351–370. doi:10.1023/A:1014873029258
Rio, R. ; Cilleruelo, E. 2010. Discovering technologies using techmining: the case of waste recycling. The 6th International Scientific Conference “Business and Management 2010. Vilnius, Lithuania 13-14 May. Selected Papers. Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Publishing House “Technika”, Vilnius, 2010, 950-955. ISSN:2029-4441
Rio, R.; Larrañaga, J.; Elizagarate, F. 2008. Patentalava.Dynamics of Innovation Strategies and theirRelationship with the Evolution of Patents. TheAlava province case, in The 5th InternationalScientific Conference “Business and Management”.Vilnius, Lithuania, 5–6 October. Selected papers.Vilnius: Technika, 475–480. ISBN 978-9955-28-311-9.
Yun, Y.; Akers, L.; Klose, T.; Barcelon, C. 2008. TextMining and Visualization Tools – Impressions ofEmerging Capabilities, World Patent Information30: 280–293. doi:10.1016/j.wpi.2008.01.007
Zhu, D.; Porter, A. L. 2002. Automated Extraction and Visualization of Information for Technological Intelligence and Forecasting, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 69: 495–506. doi:10.1016/S0040-1625(01)00157-3
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