Using Patent Information for New Product Development: Keyword-Based Technology Roadmapping Approach

In recent days as rapid changes in markets and technologies are increasingly to shorten the lifetime of products. It is becoming essential for firms to constantly develop the new products into markets. Technology roadmaps, therefore, are considered to be efficient, effective tool of connecting both product and technology planning´s collectively, thus being widely accepted by firms. However, those roadmaps and their methodologies hitherto proposed generally tend to have overstated the qualitative, expert-dependent knowledge rather than incorporating objective information. In addition, useful methodologies are often observed to lack, to facilitate a large variety of decision-makings faced in roadmapping processes. Consequently, this paper proposes a new approach: keyword-based technology roadmapping method by using the patents which contains relatively objective information, a quantitative method to support the reliable decision-making processes. Hence, text-mining technique is utilized in this study to extract the relevant information on which the portfolio analysis, co-word analysis and network analysis are carried out, resulting in three different types of product-technology maps. Also, these maps demonstrate the applicability as to where to be applied usefully in a specific step of roadmapping processes. These techniques are highly expected to reflect the objective, quantitative information to roadmapping, and to effectively help improve the overall roadmap quality at the end