IPC Co-occurrence Based Technological Trends Discovery

Technological trends discovery has been paid attention seriously in recent years in technological innovation management because of great demands on R&D decision making from the governments and various organizations. In this paper, the framework integrating with technology coupling, IPC co-occurrence, complex networks and visualization would be developed. The paper first introduces the technology coupling theory which is developed by Fleming and can be used to measure the utility of patent. Then the application of IPC co-occurrence and complex network base on technology coupling theory is designed. At last, we make the empirical study on hybrid electric vehicle field. The empirical study identifies that our framework helps to discover and mine the technological trends at the company level.