Identifying core environmental technologies through patent analysis

Abstract

This study proposes a new approach for identifying core environmental technologies based on patent co-classification information. First, technological interrelationship matrices of intensity, relatedness and cross-impact perspectives are constructed with support, lift and confidence values calculated by conducting an association rule mining on the co-classification information of patent data. Second, the analytic network process is applied to the constructed technological interrelationship matrices in order to produce the importance values of environmental technologies from each perspective, considering their direct and indirect interrelationships. Finally, data envelopment analysis is employed to the derived importance values in order to identify priorities of environmental technologies, putting three perspectives together. The proposed approach can be utilized for both firms’ planning of environmental technologies and eco-innovation policy-making of governments.

Keywords:

• eco-innovation
• core environmental technology
• patent co-classification
• technological interrelationship
• association rule mining
• analytic network process
• data envelopment analysis

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (2011-0007373) and also Hankuk University of Foreign Studies research fund.