Locate the technological position by technology redundancy and centralities: Patent citation network perspective

Patent citation is important to analyse technological ability of a company, however, it only tells the relationship between a pair of technologies or companies. Patent citation network constructed by the concept of social network could explore the relationship of companies within a whole network. This study builds up a model to locate the technological position by technological redundancy and centralities of patent citation network. Technological redundancy includes two indicators of technological knowledge status and technological knowledge reliability. Centralities have four indicators of degree, eigenvector, closeness and betweenness centralities. After the model is built, the study tries to locate the companies' technological position of the sector of Intelligent Transportation System with this model. The result suggests that the model is effective to locate the companies' technological position before and after patents' transfer. From the positions' changes, the study finds out three kinds of acquisition strategies (l)enhance barriers to consolidate position, (2) milch cow for non-practicing entities, (3)shortcut for periphery and new entrants.