Data Driven Detection of Technological Trajectories

The paper presents a text mining approach to identifying and analyzing technological trajectories. The main problem addressed is the selection of documents related to a particular technology. These documents are needed to detect a trajectory of technology. The approach includes new keyword and keyphrase detection method, word2vec embeddings-based similar document search method and fuzzy logic-based methodology for revealing technology dynamics. USPTO patent database was used for experiments. The database contains more than 4.7 million documents from 1996 to 2020. Self-driving car technology was chosen as an example. The result of the experiment shows that the developed methods are useful for effective searching and analyzing information about given technologies. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.