Integrating Technology-Relationship-Technology Semantic Analysis and Technology Roadmapping Method: A Case of Elderly Smart Wear Technology

How to understand the innovation pathways of emerging technologies emerge from technology to market and identifing the future changes and trends in innovation pathways is crucial for enterprises’ research and development (R&D) strategic planning, and new production development decision making. The technology roadmapping (TRM) is considered as an effective method to study innovation pathways, and provides a structured approach to map how emerging technologies have evolved from technology to market, and visualize the development relationships among markets, products, and technologies. However, the traditional TRM methods to visualize the innovation pathways, and identify the relationships among markets, products, and technologies mainly relied on experts’ opinions, which are considered as time consuming and costly. The technology-relationship-technology (TRT) semantic analysis can semiautomatically extract technology information and the relationships among products, functions, and technologies from patents, which can significantly reduce the bias due to using experts’ opinions that are based on intuitive knowledge when roadmapping the innovation pathways from technology to market activities. Therefore, this article integrates TRT semantic analysis and TRM method to propose a framework for monitoring the innovation pathways of emerging technologies and identifying future changes and trends in innovation pathways of emerging technologies. In this framework, first, we use the TRT semantic analysis to extract the TRT structures containing various structural relationships from the patents, and determine the analytical dimensions of TRM based on the TRT structures’ characteristics and experts’ knowledge. Second, we analyze the various structural relationships in-depth to explore their particular contributions in the process of TRM construction, and construct the technology roadmap to monitor the innovation pathways. Finally, after completing the construction of the TRT-based technology roadmap, we in-depth analyze the technology, function, product evolution paths in the TRM to identify the future changes and trends in innovation pathways with the help of domain experts. To illustrate the implementation of the research framework, we employ the elderly smart wear technology as the case study. This article will contribute to the TRM methodology, and will be of interest to elderly smart wear technology R&D experts and new production development experts.