How to analyze technology life cycle from the perspective of patent characteristics?

There has been a good deal of studies investigating technology life cycle by measuring patent activity indicators, especially patent applications. As for four main stages of technology life cycle, there is consensus on the interpretation of technology evolution depicted as a S-shaped curve. For measuring market value of a patent, there have been a lot of empirical studies that test patent indicators concerning their appropriability as predictors of monetary patent value. This study aims to observe technology life cycle form the perspective of dynamics of patent characteristics, which are newly proposed as an approach for characterizing technology life cycle in this study. To obtain the objective of this research, DVD technologies which have been already experienced four stages of a life cycle, i.e. 1) Introduction, 2) Growth, 3) Maturity, 4) Decline, is selected for analyzing its patent characteristics as a function of different stages in its life cycle. The results obtained in this study can be served as a basis for creating a model for forecasting the size of potential market in each of the above 4 stages. The larger numbers of patent reference, non-patent references and foreign reference, which occurred in Maturity stage and Decline stage, suggest that mature and declined technology encourages patent inventors to cite prior patents in order to seek for opportunity of radical and discontinuous technological innovation.