TrendPerceptor: A property–function based technology intelligence system for identifying technology trends from patents

Technology intelligence systems are vital components for planning of technology development and formulation of technology strategies. Although such systems provide computation supports for technology analysis, much effort and intervention of experts, who may be expensive or unavailable, is required in gathering processes of information for analysis. As a remedy, this paper proposes TrendPerceptor, a system that uses a property–function based approach. The proposed system assists experts (1) to identify trends in invention concepts from patents, and (2) to perform evolution trend analysis of patents for technology forecasting. For this purpose, a module of the system uses grammatical analysis of textual information to automatically extract properties and functions, which show innovation directions in a given technology. Using the identified properties and functions, a module for invention concept analysis based on network analysis and a module for evolution trend analysis based on TRIZ (Russian acronym of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) trends are suggested. This paper describes the architecture of a system composed of these three modules, and illustrates two case studies using the system.