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Requirement-oriented core technological components’ identification based on SAO analysis

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Abstract

Technologies play an important role in the survival and development of enterprises. Understanding and monitoring the core technological components (e.g., technology process, operation method, function) of a technology is an important issue for researchers to develop R&D policy and manage product competitiveness. However, it is difficult to identify core technological components from a mass of terms, and we may experience some difficulties with describing complete technical details and understanding the terms-based results. This paper proposes a Subject-Action-Object (SAO)-based method, in which (1) a syntax-based approach is constructed to extract the SAO structures describing the function, relationship and operation in specified topics; (2) a systematic method is built to extract and screen technological components from SAOs; and (3) we propose a “relevance indicator” to calculate the relevance of the technological components to requirements, and finally identify core technological components based on this indicator. Based on the considerations for requirements and novelty, the core technological components identified have great market potential and can be useful in monitoring and forecasting new technologies. An empirical study of graphene is performed to demonstrate the proposed method. The resulting knowledge may hold interest for R&D management and corporate technology strategies in practice.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the General Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 71673024, 71373019), the Australian Research Council (ARC) under discovery grants DP140101366 and DP150101645. This paper was also funded by the International Graduate Exchange Program of Beijing Institute of Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Chao Yang, Donghua Zhu, Xuefeng Wang & Yi Zhang

  2. Decision Systems and e-Service Intelligence Lab, Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Chao Yang, Yi Zhang, Guangquan Zhang & Jie Lu

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  1. Chao Yang
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Correspondence to Xuefeng Wang.

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Yang, C., Zhu, D., Wang, X. et al. Requirement-oriented core technological components’ identification based on SAO analysis. Scientometrics 112, 1229–1248 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2444-5

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