Measuring and Mapping the Trajectory of Converging Technologies in Asia n countries - The perspective of social network analysis

摘要

Demand pull and technology push are the driving forces of the integration, convergence and innovation of industrial technologies. Novel technologies integrated from existing technologies can lead to produce new technologies, bring new products into market, reform the existing industries and gestate emerging ones, result in the industrial technological renewal and push the industry evolvement. For example, the convergence of information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology brings the industry revolutionary changes and facilitates the cross-discipline emergence of biochip, bioinformatics, quantum computing, etc. Through systematical analysis and measurement of the trajectory of converging, technologies could help reconfigure companies take in advantages and be ahead of the value creation in the industry changing era. Therefore, this study is an attempt to systematically analysis the industrial evolution and measuring the trajectory of industry technological change of six technological emerging Asian countries, including Taiwan, South Korea, China, India, Singapore and Israel. By using the patent data of these six countries issued from USPTO to investigate the technology convergence development from 1981 through 2005. The research combines the quantitative method, which is a set of parameters defining in Social Network theory and the qualitative method, description by comparing the mapping of trajectories in every five years five time periods. The results show that Korea and Taiwan had brightened performance on the dramatically rapid growth on patent applications and also experienced the technological convergence and industrial evolution. The other Asian countries such as Singapore, Israel, China and India experienced industry evolution in the last decade. Taiwan and Korea have the highest technology converging ratio, Network Density ratio and velocity of converging (maturity). As for the mapping of trajectories of technological convergence, Singapore has similar pathway to Korea. India and Israel were focusing on several specific technology domains and made technology converging happen on organic chemistry, biotechnology, medicine and ICT areas.