Innovation Mapping and Research Front Identification: Tools to Assess RD Trends and Opportunities

摘要

Strategic innovation management requires a continuous monitoring of the innovation and R&D landscape. Usually, innovation comes as a result of combining emergent or existing technologies or methods in new scenarios, and permeability between partner organizations, business units, or different teams is the source of new ideas and opportunities. The strategic management of innovation requires the deployment of organization processes and best-practices to promote communication, and to monitor the outcomes of the innovation efforts done by third parties. Innovation agents need tools for making these innovation monitoring activities. One of the most promising tools on this area are those designed for the identification of research fronts. Defined as clusters of co-cited core papers and groups of papers that cite one or more of these core papers, research fronts have been used to map scientific and academic activity. The results obtained with this technique provide depth knowledge about the evolution of research trends, and the combined use of different concepts to generate new research ideas and areas to apply basic research. This paper analyses the feasibility of using research front analysis tools to identify and monitor research and innovation trends. The case study has been completed on a sample set of patents related to the Global Navigation Satellite Systems knowledge area. The analysis has been done using different available tools for scientific mapping. Research conclusions demonstrate that the regular monitoring of research trends using research front analysis and the open tools currently available is an activity that may report significant benefits to organizations. These benefits include a better understanding of the innovation landscape, and a deeper knowledge of the role played by different agents that may be identified as potential partners for future R&D projects.