Technological distance measures: new perspectives on nearby and far away

Editorial Deciphering Convergence: Novel Insights and Future Ideas on Science, Technology, and Industry Convergence

“…Hence, industrial convergence is the fusion of firms or industry segments [2], [21], [39], resulting from a complex series of events unfolding over time and starting with convergence occurring in science, technology, and then market. Such a complexity, for instance, can entail either knowledge recombination dynamics in closely related fields [41], [42], or searching mechanisms [72], [73] whereby agents try to scout new intersections and generate new fields of investigation, establishing strategic collaborations with partners having distant technological expertise [43], or deploying acquisition strategies through alliances [6]. Specifically, Geum et al [44] provide empirical evidence of successful Korean cases of industrial convergence by outlining a first taxonomy; Preschitschek et al [45] assess the convergence of industries by measuring the semantic similarity of the patents within specific technological fields finding inconsistencies in using only IPC coclassification analyses; Christensen [46] looks at the trajectories of complementary convergence claiming the importance of mergers and acquisitions as a central means for realizing convergence; and Katz [47] discusses about the formation of new industry segment out of convergence in telecommunications and computer industries.…”

Graphical analysis of agricultural research spillover potential

“…Similar examples are shown by Aitchison (1992). According to Simon and Sick (2016), the cosine/Jaffe measure increases with increasing number of irrelevant patent classes even though there is no change in the overlap. It is apparent from this example that the Aitchison distance measure is lower than the Jaffe measure.…”

TechMaps: exploring technology relationships through patent information based proximity

“…By discovering technology proximity, we mean to assess the similarity of technologies, namely the share of knowledge and techniques. In the case of characterizing technology using patent information, proximity could be evaluated by identifying the commonalities at classification level (Jaffe, 1986 ; Simon and Sick, 2016 ; Alstott et al, 2017 ). In other words, two technologies are closer to each other than a third one when the first two have more classification information in common in any way that the third one (Boyack et al, 2000 ; Schoen et al, 2012 ; Woerter, 2012 ; Okubo, 2017 ).…”

“…Revealing the technical fields where companies have industrial or research developments could play a key role in the decision-making of technology players in areas such as analysis of competition (Schoen et al, 2012 ), firm collaboration (Simon and Sick, 2016 ), or mergers and acquisitions (Simon and Sick, 2016 ).…”

“…Yan and Luo ( 2017 ) presented an overview of distance measurement for patent mapping. Simon and Sick ( 2016 ) disclosed the computation of technology distance based on patent classification codes. And, Schoen et al ( 2012 ) studied the evaluation of technological proximity based on patent information, specifically using co-classification.…”