The rapid pace of technological advances creates many difficulties for R&D practitioners in analyzing emerging technologies. Patent information analysis is an effective tool in this situation. Conventional patent information analysis has focused on the extraction of vacant, promising, or core technologies and the monitoring of technological trends. From a technology management perspective, the ultimate purpose of R&D is technology commercialization. The core of technology commercialization is the technology transfer phase. Although a great number of patents are filed, publicized, and registered every year, many commercially relevant patents are filtered through registration processes that examine novelty, creativity, and industrial applicability. Despite the efforts of these selection processes, the number of patents being transferred is low when compared with total annual patent registrations. To deal with this problem, this study proposes a predictive model for technology transfer using patent analysis. In the predictive model, patent analysis is conducted to reveal the quantitative relations between technology transfer and a range of variables included in the patent data.

Most companies develop technologies to improve their competitiveness in the marketplace. Typically, they then patent these technologies around the world in order to protect their intellectual property. Other companies may use patented technologies to develop new products, but must pay royalties to the patent holders or owners. Should they fail to do so, this can result in legal disputes in the form of patent infringement actions between companies. To avoid such situations, companies attempt to research and develop necessary technologies before their competitors do so. An important part of this process is analyzing existing patent documents in order to identify emerging technologies. In such analyses, extracting sustainable technology from patent data is important, because sustainable technology drives technological competition among companies and, thus, the development of new technologies. In addition, selecting sustainable technologies makes it possible to plan their R&D (research and development) efficiently. In this study, we propose a network model that can be used to select the sustainable technology from patent documents, based on the centrality and degree of a social network analysis. To verify the performance of the proposed model, we carry out a case study using actual patent data from patent databases.

It is very difficult for us to accurately predict occurrence of a fire. But, this is very important to protect human life and property. So, we study fire hazard prediction and evaluation methods to cope with fire risks. In this paper, we propose three models based on statistical machine learning and optimized risk indexing for fire risk assessment. We build logistic regression, deep neural networks (DNN) and fire risk indexing models, and verify performances between proposed and traditional models using real investigated data related to fire occurrence in Korea. In general, fire prediction models currently in use do not provide satisfactory levels of accuracy. The reason for this result is that the factors affecting fire occurrence are very diverse and frequency of fire occurrence is very sparse. To improve accuracy of fire occurrence, we first build logistic regression and DNN models. In addition, we construct a fire risk indexing model for a more improved model of fire prediction. To illustrate comparison results between our research models and current fire prediction model, we use real fire data investigated in Korea between 2011 to 2017. From the experimental results of this paper, we can confirm that accuracy of prediction by the proposed method is superior to the existing fire occurrence prediction model. Therefore, we expect the proposed model to contribute to evaluating the possibility of fire risk in buildings and factories in the field of fire insurance and to calculate the fire insurance premium.

Technology analysis (TA) is an important issue in the management of technology. Most R&D (Research & Development) policies have depended on diverse TA results. Traditional TA results have been obtained through qualitative approaches such as the Delphi expert survey, scenario analysis, or technology road mapping. Although they are representative methods for TA, they are not stable because their results are dependent on the experts’ knowledge and subjective experience. To solve this problem, recently many studies on TA have been focused on quantitative approaches, such as patent analysis. A patent document has diverse information of developed technologies, and thus, patent is one form of objective data for TA. In addition, sustainable technology has been a big issue in the TA fields, because most companies have their technological competitiveness through the sustainable technology. Sustainable technology is a technology keeping the technological superiority of a company. So a country as well as a company should consider sustainable technology for technological competition and continuous economic growth. Also it is important to manage sustainable technology in a given technology domain. In this paper, we propose a new patent analysis approach based on statistical analysis for the management of sustainable technology (MOST). Our proposed methodology for the MOST is to extract a technological structure and relationship for knowing the sustainable technology. To do this, we develop a hierarchical diagram of technology for finding the causal relationships among technological keywords of a given domain. The aim of the paper is to select the sustainable technology and to create the hierarchical technology paths to sustainable technology for the MOST. This contributes to planning R&D strategy for the sustainability of a company. To show how the methodology can be applied to real problem, we perform a case study using retrieved patent documents related to telematics technology.