Comprehensive Monitoring of Large-Scale 5G Technology Development

Technology analysis and scouting is of great importance for appropriate management and development of innovation. It helps understand market trends and decide the direction of technology development for R&D planning purposes. This paper aims to track waves of innovations in the fifth generation (5G) technologies for mobile communication through patent analysis. It combines text mining techniques and regression analysis to reveal trends and hotspots of technology development. It also proposes a semi-supervised method to eliminate irrelevant documents from a large patent dataset. Results show a mapping of the 5G technological trends in 47 topics, which are identified by a topic model technique. The developed methodology can help firms identify important technological topics in 5G for making their R&D investment decisions. Firms can select appropriate technology strategies depending on the topic's emergence position in the topic strategy matrix.