Identifying Breakthrough Patent Topics by Measuring Technological Convergence——Case Study of Solar PV Domain
Han Fang1,Zhang Shengtai2,Feng Lingzi1,Yuan Junpeng1()
1National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China 2School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Beijing 100876, China
[Objective] This paper aims to identify the breakthrough topics from the core patents. [Methods] First, we retrieved the core patents from the Innography platform. Then, we identified the breakthrough innovative topics based on the measurement of the core patents’ Rao-Stirling diversity indices as well as the LDA text mining method. Finally, we conducted an empirical study to examine the proposed method with patents from the solar PV domain. [Results] We found that the core patents were mainly related to the disciplines of optics, electricity, and architecture, etc. We also identified 12 breakthrough innovative topics related to photoelectric conversion material, photovoltaic application, and thermoelectric power system. [Limitations] More research is needed to explore the measurement of technological convergence using different patent classification methods. [Conclusions] The proposed method can effectively discover the breakthrough topics from a certain domain of patents.
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