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Towards quantification of the role of materials innovation in overall technological development
Get PDFThis article presents a method for quantitatively assessing the role of materials innovation in overall technological development. The method involves classifying the technical changes underlying the overall innovation process first within a set of functional categories and then within each category as a hierarchical array of technical changes. It is specifically found that about 2/3 of the total progress in computation over the past 40 years has been due to materials/process innovations. More speculatively, materials/process innovation contributes at least 20% of the progress in all areas and the relative contribution of materials/process innovation to overall technological progress has grown in the past few decades.W. L. Gore & Associate
Artifact interactions retard technological improvement: An empirical study
No full textEmpirical research has shown performance improvement of many different technological domains occurs exponentially but with widely varying improvement rates. What causes some technologies to improve faster than others do? Previous quantitative modeling research has identified artifact interactions, where a design change in one component influences others, as an important determinant of improvement rates. The models predict that improvement rate for a domain is proportional to the inverse of the domain’s interaction parameter. However, no empirical research has previously studied and tested the dependence of improvement rates on artifact interactions. A challenge to testing the dependence is that any method for measuring interactions has to be applicable to a wide variety of technologies. Here we propose a novel patent-based method that is both technology domain-agnostic and less costly than alternative methods. We use textual content from patent sets in 27 domains to find the influence of interactions on improvement rates. Qualitative analysis identified six specific keywords that signal artifact interactions. Patent sets from each domain were then examined to determine the total count of these 6 keywords in each domain, giving an estimate of artifact interactions in each domain. It is found that improvement rates are positively correlated with the inverse of the total count of keywords with Pearson correlation coefficient of +0.56 with a p-value of 0.002. The results agree with model predictions, and provide, for the first time, empirical evidence that artifact interactions have a retarding effect on improvement rates of technological domains
A hybrid keyword and patent class methodology for selecting relevant sets of patents for a technological field
Get PDFThis paper presents a relatively simple, objective and repeatable method for selecting sets of patents that are representative of a specific technological domain. The methodology consists of using search terms to locate the most representative international and US patent classes and determines the overlap of those classes to arrive at the final set of patents. Five different technological fields (computed tomography, solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, electric capacitors, electrochemical batteries) are used to test and demonstrate the proposed method. Comparison against traditional keyword searches and individual patent class searches shows that the method presented in this paper can find a set of patents with more relevance and completeness and no more effort than the other two methods. Follow on procedures to potentially improve the relevancy and completeness for specific domains are also defined and demonstrated. The method is compared to an expertly selected set of patents for an economic domain, and is shown to not be a suitable replacement for that particular use case. The paper also considers potential uses for this methodology and the underlying techniques as well as limitations of the methodology.SUTD-MIT International Design Cente
Erratum to: A hybrid keyword and patent class methodology for selecting relevant sets of patents for a technological field
No full textIn the original publication of the article, the data in Table 6 ‘‘Comparison of the different search methods including the adjusted HKC method’’ size and relevancy percentage of the cell in row ‘‘Electric capacitor’’ and column ‘‘Classification selection’’ has been published incorrectly as 9,472 (2 %). It should read as 69,277 (7 %). The correct version of Table 6 is provided below
Technology structural implications from the extension of a patent search method
No full textMany areas of academic and industrial work make use of the notion of a ‘technology’. This paper attempts to reduce the ambiguity around the definition of what constitutes a ‘technology’ by extension of a method described previously that finds highly relevant patent sets for specified technological fields. The method relies on a less ambiguous definition that includes both a functional component and a component consisting of the underlying knowledge in a technological field to form a two-component definition. These two components form a useful definition of a technology that allows for objective, repeatable and thus comparable analysis of specific technologies. 28 technological domains are investigated: the extension of an earlier technique is shown to be capable of finding highly relevant and complete patent sets for each of the technologies. Overall, about 500,000 patents from 1976 to 2012 are classified into these 28 domains. The patents in each of these sets are not only highly relevant to the domain of interest but there are relatively low numbers of patents classified into any two of these domains (total patents classified in two domains are 2.9 % of the total patents and the great majority of patent class pairs have zero overlap with a few of the 378 patent class pairs containing the bulk of the doubly listed patents). On the other hand, the patents within a given domain cite patents in other domains about 90 % of the time. These results suggest that technology can be usefully decomposed to distinct units but that the inventions in these relatively tightly contained units depend upon widely spread additional knowledge.SUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC
Analysis of Social Dynamics on FDA Panels Using Social Networks Extracted from Meeting Transcripts
No full textThe social elements of technical decision-making are not well understood, particular among expert committees. This is largely due to a lack of methodology for directly studying such interactions in real-world situations. This paper presents a method for the analysis of transcripts of expert committee meetings, with an eye towards understanding the process by which information is communicated in order to reach a decision. In particular, we focus on medical device advisory panels in the US Food and Drug Administration. The method is based upon natural language processing tools, and is designed to extract social networks from these transcripts, which are representative of the flow of information and communication on the panel. Application of this method to a set of 37 meetings from the FDA's Circulatory Systems Devices Panel shows the presence of numerous effects. Prominent among these is the propensity for panel members from similar medical specialties to use similar language. Furthermore, panel members who use similar language have the propensity to vote similarly. We find that these propensities are correlated - i.e., as panel members' language converges by medical specialty, panel members' votes also tend to converge. This suggests that voting behavior is mediated by membership in a medical specialty and supports the notion that voting outcome is, to some extent, dependent on an interpretation of the data associated with training.MIT-Portugal Progra
Tracing Technological Development Trajectories: A Genetic Knowledge Persistence-Based Main Path Approach
No full textThe aim of this paper is to propose a new method to identify main paths in a technological domain using patent citations. Previous approaches for using main path analysis have greatly improved our understanding of actual technological trajectories but nonetheless have some limitations. They have high potential to miss some dominant patents from the identified main paths; nonetheless, the high network complexity of their main paths makes qualitative tracing of trajectories problematic. The proposed method searches backward and forward paths from the high-persistence patents which are identified based on a standard genetic knowledge persistence algorithm. We tested the new method by applying it to the desalination and the solar photovoltaic domains and compared the results to output from the same domains using a prior method. The empirical results show that the proposed method can dramatically reduce network complexity without missing any dominantly important patents. The main paths identified by our approach for two test cases are almost 10x less complex than the main paths identified by the existing approach. The proposed approach identifies all dominantly important patents on the main paths, but the main paths identified by the existing approach miss about 20% of dominantly important patents
Technology-based design and sustainable economic growth
Get PDFThis paper seeks to analyze how design creates economic value. The literature on knowledge-based economic development has primarily focused on innovation as the analytical lens, whereas design is the original action that leads to innovation. Despite the fundamental importance of design, existing design research has offered few insights and little guidance for national strategies due to the lack of focus on and analysis of design in an economic context. This paper addresses such gaps by linking design research and economic development theory. We first elaborate on the relationship among design, invention and innovation, describing the necessity of design activity for invention and innovation. Our analysis of the fundamental characteristics of design across contexts sheds light on the strategic importance of the accumulative nature of technology-based design for sustaining economic growth. Through the lens of technology-based design, we further quantitatively compare Singapore and three similarly-sized countries (South Korea, Finland and Taiwan). Based upon interview data, we also qualitatively examine Singapore's national strategy focusing on design. The quantitative and qualitative results align well with the Singaporean government's use of design as a strategic lever to pursue innovation-driven economic growth, and also reveal its achievements and shortfalls which indicate possible directions for strategic adjustment. Keywords: Technology-based design; Invention; Innovation; Design capability; Economic growthSUTD-MIT International Design Centre (IDC
Beyond R&D: What Design Adds to a Modern Research University
No full textThe government of Singapore is launching a new university, the Singapore University
of Technology and Design (SUTD), that is scheduled to take in its first freshman class in
April, 2012. SUTD, in collaboration with MIT and Zhejiang University, is striving to
establish a 21st century innovation paradigm that recognizes the synergy between
innovation and design. Many aspects of such an exciting development are of interest to
engineering educators and particularly to design educators and two are covered in this
paper.
One challenge addressed in this paper is the possibility for conflicting agendas between
design‐centric education and the goal of becoming a leading research‐intensive
university. An overview of research intended to address this conflict –that of the
International Design Center that is jointly part of MIT and SUTD‐ is given. It is argued
that, rather than conflicting, design‐centric education and research‐intensity are
synergistic for a 21st century university. The second challenge discussed in some depth
is the setting of “culture” for the new institution that encourages bold attempts to
improve the world through technical innovation (“innovation culture”) with breadth in
national cultures (“global culture”) bridging from Western to Asian perspectives.
Relative to the latter item, a central feature are the “Eastern Cultural” curriculum items
being developed by a second SUTD partner university ‐ Zhejiang University
(Hangzhou, China). The breadth of national cultures and a wide academic disciplinary
base as part of the education process are postulated to be enablers for developing a
strong 21st century innovation‐leadership‐culture for the modern research university
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