Identifying Technology Opportunities for Electric Motors of Railway Vehicles with Patent Analysis

Abstract

An electric motor is a device that changes electrical energy into mechanical energy for railway vehicles. When developing the electric motor, it used to be developed simply for structures or control methods of the motor itself without considering convergence with other devices or technologies. However, as the railway vehicles become more advanced, technology development through convergence with other devices or technologies is spreading. Therefore, based on patent data related to the electric motors applied to the railway vehicles, this research aims to carry out technical forecasting for establishing research and development (R and D) direction for new technologies by predicting vacant technologies from the point of view of technology convergence. In other words, we studied how to find the vacant technologies in a field of convergence technology for the electric motor of the railway vehicles by analyzing the patent data. More specifically, we search the patents data associated with the electric motor of the railway vehicle that contain multiple IPC codes, and use multiple IPC codes to determine the field of convergence technology. In addition, we extract keywords from the patents data related to each of the determined convergence technologies and define the vacant technologies by interpreting the field of convergence technology and the extracted keywords.

Forecasting Directions, Dates, And Causes of Future Technological Revolutions concerning the Growth of Human Capital

“…Choi et al extracted the international patents using the text mining technique, including the subgroups of this field, including pathology, radiology, and telesurgery. Moreover, they drew the life cycle curve, the starting point, the peak, and the saturation for each of these subgroups [8].…”

“…On the other hand, the general goal of knowledge discovery is "to extract potential information" [7]. e patent analysis method is one of the scienti c and quantitative technology forecasting methods [8]. Due to the limited budget of research and development departments, it is necessary that these departments focus on the development of technologies that are more likely to be successful, and the time for their commercialization is short.…”

A Patent Analysis to Identify Emergent Topics and Convergence Fields: A Case Study of Chitosan

“…The current patent classification system is complex and hierarchical, comprising the descending levels of section, class, subclass, group, and subgroup (Figure 1). Patents contain substantial information about innovation phenomena, and patent co-classification analysis has been extensively used in numerous previous studies [49][50][51][52][53]. Curran and Leker [4] analyzed patent co-classification by investigating overlaps of patent classes to monitor technological convergence in different fields of the ICT sector.…”

Workforce Composition of Public R&D and Performance: Evidence from Korean Government-Funded Research Institutes

“…The PCT is an international treaty administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that makes it possible to seek patent protection for an invention simultaneously in a large number of countries by filing a single international application with a single patent office [58]. Patents reflect technological knowledge and are valid and robust indicators of knowledge creation [59,60]. Moreover, the patent application and examination process can also reflect the external validity of novel inventions [61] in that the process, which is costly, represents a positive expectation by inventors of the economic significance of their inventions [61].…”