Emerging technologies: quantitative identification and measurement

Abstract

Emerging technologies present both challenges and opportunities for national technology strategies. National governments may therefore want to monitor the technological horizon on a systematic basis. This article outlines the quantitative approaches available for such monitoring. Among the standard types of bibliometric data, proposals and publications are most likely to be useful for this purpose since they capture information earlier in the cycle of technology development. Patents, in contrast, trail behind. Analysis can proceed with keywords or citations, and algorithms are available to use the information structure inherent in these kinds of data to identify and measure emerging areas. There are limitations, however, in all the available approaches and the authors therefore recommend using them in conjunction with expert methods by focusing the qualitative assessment in particular areas.

Keywords:

• emerging technologies
• quantitative analysis
• bibliometrics

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Korea Institute for Science and Technology Information under Contract Number F05002 for the work reported here.

Notes

Recently Christensen changed his notion of ‘disruptive technology’ for the notion of ‘disruptive innovation’ since, according to the author, what at the end is disruptive is not the technology itself but the innovation strategy instead (Christensen and Raynor 2003).

We conclude this based on the analysis of the abstracts of 1927 documents registered by the ISI Web of Science published between 1956 and August 2005 containing the term ‘emerging technolog*’, which included the articles published in a special issue of the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change (Vol. 72, No. 3) in 2005 that is devoted to the selected papers of the METiA (Managing Emerging Technologies in Asia) Conference. We found no definition of emerging technologies in any of the papers in the special issue. For an overall review of the METiA Conference and the special issue, see Koh, Narasimhalu, and Tan (2005).

A co-citation link is formed between two older documents when they are cited together in a newer document. Citation information can also be used in the form of bibliographic coupling, the link formed between two newer documents when the cite the same older document. Bibliographic coupling has not been applied to evolutionary analysis of the kind we are discussing here, so we will not refer to it further.

The formula used is generally intersect over union, that is, co-citations over cites to item one plus cites to item two minus co-citations.