Opportunity Identification for New Product Planning: Ontological Semantic Patent Classification

Intelligence tools have been developed and applied widely in many different areas in engineering, business and management. Many commercialized tools for business intelligence are available in the market. However, no practically useful tools for technology intelligence are available at this time, and very little academic research in technology intelligence methods has been conducted to date. Patent databases are the most important data source for technology intelligence tools, but patents inherently contain unstructured data. Consequently, extracting text data from patent databases, converting that data to meaningful information and generating useful knowledge from this information become complex tasks. These tasks are currently being performed very ineffectively, inefficiently and unreliably by human experts. This deficiency is particularly vexing in product planning, where awareness of market needs and technological capabilities is critical for identifying opportunities for new products and services. Total nescience of the text of patents, as well as inadequate, unreliable and untimely knowledge derived from these patents, may consequently result in missed opportunities that could lead to severe competitive disadvantage and potentially catastrophic loss of revenue. The research performed in this dissertation tries to correct the abovementioned deficiency with an approach called patent mining. The research is conducted at Finex, an iron casting company that produces traditional kitchen skillets. To \u27mine\u27 pertinent patents, experts in new product development at Finex modeled one ontology for the required product features and another for the attributes of requisite metallurgical enabling technologies from which new product opportunities for skillets are identified by applying natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning (classification) to the text of patents in the USPTO database. Three main scenarios are examined in my research. Regular classification (RC) relies on keywords that are extracted directly from a group of USPTO patents. Ontological classification (OC) relies on keywords that result from an ontology developed by Finex experts, which is evaluated and improved by a panel of external experts. Ontological semantic classification (OSC) uses these ontological keywords and their synonyms, which are extracted from the WordNet database. For each scenario, I evaluate the performance of three classifiers: k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), random forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). My research shows that OSC is the best scenario and SVM is the best classifier for identifying product planning opportunities, because this combination yields the highest score in metrics that are generally used to measure classification performance in machine learning (e.g., ROC-AUC and F-score). My method also significantly outperforms current practice, because I demonstrate in an experiment that neither the experts at Finex nor the panel of external experts are able to search for and judge relevant patents with any degree of effectiveness, efficiency or reliability. This dissertation provides the rudiments of a theoretical foundation for patent mining, which has yielded a machine learning method that is deployed successfully in a new product planning setting (Finex). Further development of this method could make a significant contribution to management practice by identifying opportunities for new product development that have been missed by the approaches that have been deployed to date

Application of Reference Models in Technology Management

Reference models, sometimes called with other different words, prepare a general model from a specific view of the related environment. Reference models are considered as a basic foundation to create: 1) a common language among specialists 2) a reference for the entities such as processes 3) relationships among entities 4) tools and decision making procedures for the real world. In this report, it\u27s tried the definitions of reference model in the selected papers have been reviewed. It\u27s noticeable that in many papers the term of framework is used instead of reference model. Also, applications of reference models are reviewed and finally future studies are suggested

Technology Assessment and Attractive Analysis of a New Concrete Modifier

MB, a new concrete modifier containing Silica Fume (FS), has fantastic performance based on the claims of a Russian Company. Iran’s government decided to invest to produce this new concrete modifier. Iran concrete Institute (ICI) is dedicated to do this task. Technology assessment (TA), attractiveness analysis (AA), and business modeling are three main phases to study this investment. Applying TA and AA helps decision makers to make their mind based on technological facts and realities of the market. This paper covers the results of phases 1 and 2. At the end, MB is introduced a superior technology and appropriate strategies to enter the market and acquire the technology are proposed

Patent Analysis for Smart Grid Development in the U.S

By increasing demand for energy among nations the rate of fossil fuel consumption is boosting. The raise of fossil fuel consumption has motivated nations to gain some capabilities for the purpose of dealing with some consequences; the more fossil fuel consumption, the higher price for energy, and the higher rate of GHG as well. Recently smart grid technology has been introduced as a healing approach in terms of using energy more efficiently. This study made an effort to have some discussions around smart grid technology development in the United States by patent analysis and forecasting. The outcomes in both technology and company levels determined, although smart grid technology is growing up by 2015, it will still be at the first stage of its life cycle and to reach at its maturity phase several factors such as governmental support, standardization policies, and the nature of technology are involved in

Managing Knowledge-based Projects

In knowledge-based projects, many risks can be resulted due to lack of knowledge applied in the project. To avoid these risks, project based companies need to implement a convenient mechanism to develop knowledge management strategies. In this article, this mechanism is addressed as a KM strategic planning model, which is inherently a process model. This model helps to build a bridge between PMBOK processes and knowledge management strategy development. The foundation of this bridge is made on two pillars. First, the spiral of knowledge introduced by Nonaka [1] and, second, PMBOK processes. To develop the KM strategic planning model, the author is used his experiences acquired in applying knowledge management in managing projects in a consulting company

Keyword-Based Patent Citation Prediction Via Information Theory

Patent citation shows how a technology impacts other inventions, so the number of patent citations (backward citations) is used in many technology prediction studies. Current prediction methods use patent citations, but since it may take a long time till a patent is cited by other inventors, identifying impactful patents based on their citations is not an effective way. The prediction method offered in this article predicts patent citations based on the content of patents. In this research, Reconstructability Analysis (RA), which is based on information theory and graph theory, is applied to predict patent citations based on keywords extracted from the abstracts of selected patents. After applying three classes of RA (variable-based analysis without and with loops and state-based analysis), nine specific IV states of a predicting model are extracted. These states involve the four keywords of “chamber”, “hous”, “main”, and “return”. Lastly, the abstracts of the patents are examined to identify the technical subjects relevant to smart building technologies for which these keywords are proxies

Samsung OLED TV Marketing Plan

The evolution of television has substantially evolved within the last 2 decades to introduce revolutionary modern technology seen in Plasma, LCD, and LED backlight TV. The changes of television technology will offer thinner, clearer, brighter TV, and reduce energy consumption. After a brief transition of corporate strategy, Samsung has grown into the market as the leading innovative television manufacturer and currently holds 97% market share of AMOLED (Active Matrix OLED) currently seen in mobile devices. In January of 2012, Samsung introduced a high definition 55 inch prototype OLED TV at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that seemingly will revolutionize the television in performance and in design. Samsung OLED TV entering in the market early as in the late 2012 will open a new market to the television industry that will appeal to the early adopters. This report is a study of the new Samsung 55 inch OLED TV which introduces the technology of OLED, the market segment, and will forecast the OLED TV market. With innovation of OLED technology, the television will significantly change in improving clarity and performance, and also cut the thinness and weight in half, while implementing interactive and smart technology that will optimize the consumer\u27s television experience

Dynamics Capabilities

Slides from a presentation based on Teece, D. J. (January 01, 2007). Explicating dynamic capabilities: the nature and microfoundations of (sustainable) enterprise performance. Strategic Management Journal, 28, 13, 1319. Discusses capabilities that enable business enterprises to create, deploy, and protect the intangible assets that support superior long-run business performance

Case Study: The Optimization of Information Flow & Organization in Software Development

Trial and error are inevitable in the process of software development; the redesign is wasteful when unfocused communication occurs within the development process. To speed up this development process, we optimized the information flow and redesigned the development organization into chunks. First, we investigated the information flow between tasks and coupled tasks into phases utilizing the Design Structure Matrix (DSM) so that the information exchange among chunks of tasks is as few as possible. In this way, the redundant iterations of tasks are eliminated. Meanwhile, we also grouped the engineers into groups according to the tasks, in this; we eliminated wasteful communications between the groups of engineers. We depict the social network defined by the information flow within the software development sector and compared the new arrangement to the old arrangement in a visible way. This new arrangement will facilitate the communications between engineers and speed up the process of software development

‘Smart Building’ Technology Network Analysis: Applying Core–Periphery Structure Analysis

In this research, network analysis is applied to examine smart building patents to find the most effective technologies and novel opportunities for innovation. Core–periphery structure is the main analysis method deployed to exploit the most effective patents in the core network as basic inventions in smart building technologies, and also to explore the periphery network for novel opportunities to develop new technologies