Information diffusion between patents and scientific articles for identifying future R&D and business opportunities: a case study in nano-science and nano-technology

Abstract: Scientific progress and technological innovation have become major drivers of economic progress in the emerging knowledge economies where growth, productivity, and competitiveness are increasingly based on improved technologies, novel products, upgraded processes or customized services. The more important they became, the more the need was recognized to monitor their development, to examine the conditions under which they reach an optimal performance, and to formulate and carry out policies aimed at enhancing its performance and setting its priorities. However, in an era of rapidly expanding digital content, overwhelming data available on internet and the high speed of science and technology progress makes it difficult for human beings to extract useful knowledge without powerful tools. R&D teams rarely have the time or budget to read and understand all of the documents retrieved and, as a result, are increasingly overloaded with too much information. Strategic planning for science and technology development and R&D progress require having deep insight of science and technology evolutions.Information in patents and scientific articles are good source of codified knowledge. Monitoring their evolution can help managers, policy makers, researchers, scholars and industry experts in better decision making and planning for future more efficiently.Creating the framework for monitoring and tracing science and technology developments has lots of advantages. In macro view it helps policy makers and administrators develop their strategic plan, determine the R&D priorities and specify the knowledge gaps in different fields. In micro level it aids scientists, scholars and technicians getting acquainted with science and technology trends. It enables firms to respond to ever more sophisticated consumer demands and stay ahead of their competitors, both domestically and internationally. In this research, we try to investigate the relations between science and technology in nano disciplines. For this purpose scientific articles are considered as indicators of science and patents considered as indicator of technology. After studying different approaches and methods used for investigating the linkages between science and technology in different field of studies, we investigate this linkage by using two approaches, Analyzing Co-Occurrence of inventor-author names in patents and scientific articles, and lexical analysis by using text mining techniques. Our data consists of nano articles published in Science Citation Index database from 1986 to the end of September 2008 and patent records of United States Patent and Trademark Office, (USPTO), from 1790 to 2008.By finding common inventor-author’s names, we identify in which nano sub disciplines there is high probability that scientific activity leads to register patents and obtain commercial applications. In lexical approach by using text mining techniques, we develop the framework for monitoring nano-science and nano-technology evolutions based on information in scientific articles and patents. We try to determine nano sub disciplines and study the trend of each group in specified time interval. We also draw the s-curve of each cluster for analyzing their future evolution.The outcome of this research is developing practical framework for monitoring scientific articles and patent evolutions. Preparing framework for monitoring and comparing patents and papers behavior simultaneously is rather new approach and consider as our main contribution in this study.