Identification of emerging technologies through pathway-III analysis

Edgar L. Schiebel (1) , Marianne Hörlesberger (1) , Dirk Holste (1) , Ivana Roche (2) , Dominique Besagni (2) , Claire François (2)

1 AIT - Austrian Institute of Technology [Vienna]
2 INIST - Institut de l'information scientifique et technique

Early recognition of emerging technologies is very important for keeping or gaining a leading role in the markets of companies, for research organisations to stay in the front end of research as well as for national or international funding agencies to promote the right future technologies. We propose advanced methods and algorithms based on bibliometric analysis applied on large-scale databases for scientific publications in order to identify emergent technologies. In the PROM-TECH project we demonstrated in a proof-of-concept approach the possible and reliable detection of growing research activity for a variety of technological fields. Building on this work, in ongoing investigations we analysed in-depth research progress for single technologies defined by classification categories of the PASCAL database. Using keywords that addressed a more disaggregated level of a technology, however, allows for in-depth analysis of selected technology fields. We constructed a diffusion model of three diffusion stages to establish a framework for the arrangement of keywords according to their history. We statistically estimated the parameters of the diffusion model for two successive time periods of four years and were thus able to model the development of "keyword pathways". Pathways were defined as the change of a keyword from one stage to the next during subsequent time periods. We showed that technological breakthroughs in technologies could be verified by related keywords changing from stage-1 of the diffusion model to stage-3 (which we termed pathway-III). Hence pathway-III analysis was strongly indicative of technological breakthroughs in emerging technologies. Here we extend the analysis already conducted for single technological fields to the comprehensive survey of all 45 identified fields in PROM-TECH. We identify and extract keywords related to emerging technologies through a pathway-III analysis and show that it reveals new promising perspectives for emerging technologies. Co-word maps demonstrate if predefined technology classes reflect a coherent emergence of term combinations or new combinations of terms do emerge cross over predefinitions. We could show that new emerging fields tend to combine research findings cross over many technology fields.

Domaines: Recherche d'information [cs.IR]; Autre; Applications [stat.AP]

Edgar L. Schiebel, Marianne Hörlesberger, Dirk Holste, Ivana Roche, Dominique Besagni, et al.. Identification of emerging technologies through pathway-III analysis. IAMOT'2010, 19th International Conference on Management of Technology, Mar 2010, Le Caire, Egypt. ⟨hal-00614078⟩