Dominant Technology Identification Model Based on Patent Information Toward Sustainable Energy Development

Sustainable energy offers advantages of continuous regeneration, sustainable utilization, and inexhaustibility and plays an important role in the development of the world. In recent years, research on sustainable energy has become an important focus; however, leading sustainable energy technology deserves more attention. Identifying the dominant technology is significant for the decision-making and strategic layout of enterprises. In contrast to traditional technology identification methods, this study proposes a visual analysis model based on the patent-citation relationship. The visual analysis presented in this paper is divided into two parts: In the first part, the patent mutual citation data is input into the visualization software Gephi to identify the leading technology at the visual processing stage. Then, the PageRank algorithm is used to cross contrast the technical value and build the leading technology recognition model. The second part verifies the accuracy of the visual model and evaluates the technical value of each patent using the following five indexes: “number of patent cited”, “patent number of the same family”, “scope of patent coverage”, “claim number of each patent”, and “number of patent litigation”. Data of three sustainable energy technologies from the Worldwide Patent Statistical Database (PATSTAT) from 1900 to 2017 were used: solar power generation technology, hydroelectric power generation technology and wind power generation technology. The visual model correctly identified the leading technology. The results also explained the choice of the PageRank algorithm and the five indicators are most scientific and reasonable for the identification of dominant technology.