Capturing Information on Technology Convergence, International Collaboration, and Knowledge Flow from Patent Document: A Case of Information and Communication Technology

Recent advances in data-driven research approaches offer new and exciting perspectives and insights across a spectrum scientific fields concerned with technological change and the socio-economic impact thereof, while also providing the opportunity to address persistent gaps in existing theories. The present investigation suggests a novel approach to identify and analyse the evolution of technology sectors, in this case Information and Communications Technology (ICT), considering international collaboration patterns and knowledge flows and spillovers via information inputs derived from patent documents. The objective is to utilize and explore information regarding inventors’ geo-location, technology sector classifications, and patent citation records to construct various types of networks. This, in turn, will open up avenues to discover the nature of evolutionary pathways in ICT technology trajectories, and also provide evidence of how the overall ICT knowledge space, as well as directional knowledge flows within the ICT space, evolved differently. It is expected that this data-driven inquiry will deliver intuitive results for decision makers seeking evidence for future resource allocation and who are interested in identifying well-suited collaborators for the development of potential next-generation technologies. Further, it will equip researchers in technology management, economic geography, or similar fields with a systematic approach to analyse evolutionary pathways of technological advancements and further enable them to exploit existing and develop new theories regarding technological change and its socio-economic consequences.

Working paper completed 1 September 2018, published in this series October 2019. This paper was submitted for publication and accepted as a journal article in Information Processing & Management Volume 56, Issue 4, July 2019, Pages 1576-1591, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2018.09.007. Also available at http://hdl.handle.net/10197/11176.