title: Tracing Technological Development Trajectories: A Genetic Knowledge Persistence-Based Main Path Approach.
abstract: The 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information System, Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.|Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Hyunseok
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6426-1531
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Park
authors.affiliation: Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.|SUTD-MIT International Design Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
authors.forename: Christopher L
authors.initials: CL
authors.lastname: Magee
mesh_terms: D051188:Knowledge Bases; D010330:Patents as Topic; D012993:Solar Energy; D013672:Technology / Q000379:methods*