Tracing technological development trajectories: A genetic knowledge persistence-based main path approach

The aim of this paper is to propose a new method to identify main paths in a technological domain using patent citations. Previous approaches for using main path analysis have greatly improved our understanding of actual technological trajectories but nonetheless have some limitations. They have high potential to miss some dominant patents from the identified main paths; nonetheless, the high network complexity of their main paths makes qualitative tracing of trajectories problematic. The proposed method searches backward and forward paths from the high-persistence patents which are identified based on a standard genetic knowledge persistence algorithm. We tested the new method by applying it to the desalination and the solar photovoltaic domains and compared the results to output from the same domains using a prior method. The empirical results show that the proposed method overcomes the aforementioned drawbacks defining main paths that are almost 10x less complex while containing more of the relevant important knowledge than the main path networks defined by the existing method.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

Needs and Possibilities for Engineering Education: One Industrial/Academic Perspective

This paper reports a personal assessment of the readiness of new B.S. level engineering graduates to practice engineering immediately upon graduation. This assessment when reinforced by significant prior work motivates a systemic analysis of the U.S. Engineering Education System. The analysis is framed to address the implementation potential of ideas for how educators might efficiently teach undergraduate engineers “that engineering is more than differential equations”. The concepts which seem best from this analysis are combinations of aggressive intern opportunities combined with courses (starting in the freshman year) that emphasize the creative engineering process. These activities may be containable in the 4 year program but the analysis also suggests that extension of engineering education to 3 or more years beyond the B.S. would improve the possibility of reaching key educational goals including teaching adequate math and science fundamentals as well as engineering knowledge, process and creativity. Such radical change will be difficult and slow to occur (if at all) in this complex system. Moreover, this system is understandingly resistant to change because of significant perceptions of outstanding achievement. The driving force for change that may be strong enough to overcome these barriers is prospective students’ falling perceptions of engineering education as a preferred option

Towards quantification of the Role of Materials Innovation in overall Technological Development

This report develops a method for quantitatively assessing the role of materials innovation in overall technological development. The report demonstrates the method for one specific case and defines the key requirements to use it in a number of other cases. The new method involves the comparative examination of overall technical capability metrics with performance metrics at more detailed levels of progress where materials and process innovation dominates the progress. This analysis is supplemented by exploration of the specific technical capabilities utilized in technological development areas of interest. It is specifically found that about 2/3 of the total progress in computation over the past 40 years has been due to materials/process innovations. It is also found that making reasonably reliable estimates in other functional areas such as energy storage, information transmission, etc. could be possible if more attention were paid to the development and collection of technical progress metrics at the level of materials and processes (such as Moore’s Law has done for information transformation). Examination of what is known leads to three other key (but more speculative) findings: 1) Materials/process innovation contributes at least 20% of the progress in all areas examined; 2) The contribution of materials/process innovations in energy storage are possibly 80% or higher; 3) The relative contribution of materials/process innovation to overall technological progress has grown in the past few decades

Technology Structural Implications from the Extension of a Patent Search Method

Many areas of academic and industrial work make use of the notion of a ‘technology’. This paper attempts to reduce the ambiguity around the definition of what constitutes a ‘technology’ by extension of a method described previously that finds highly relevant patent sets for specified technological fields. The method relies on a less ambiguous definition that includes both a functional component and a component consisting of the underlying knowledge in a technological field to form a two-component definition. These two components form a useful definition of a technology that allows for objective, repeatable and thus comparable analysis of specific technologies. 28 technological domains are investigated: the extension of an earlier technique is shown to be capable of finding highly relevant and complete patent sets for each of the technologies. Overall, about 500,000 patents from 1976 to 2012 are classified into these 28 domains. The patents in each of these sets are not only highly relevant to the domain of interest but there are relatively low numbers of patents classified into any two of these domains (total patents classified in 2 domains are 2.9% of the total patents and the great majority of patent class pairs have zero overlap with a few of the 378 patent class pairs containing the bulk of the doubly listed patents). On the other hand, the patents within a given domain cite patents in other domains about 90% of the time. These results suggest that technology can be usefully decomposed to distinct units but that the inventions in these relatively tightly contained units depend upon widely spread additional knowledge