Identification of Emerging Areas Based on Technology Life Cycle: Unmanned Underwater Vehicles Technology as a Sample

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

Technology life cycle (TLC) is one of the main concepts in technology management, especially in technology forecasting. TLC generally is modeled by S-Curve. In spite of simplicity of this modeling, utilizing of it in recognition the situation of a specific technology is difficult. Most of the methods in modeling the TLC wouldn’t meet the requirements such as to achieve a defined level of accuracy and quantification. TLC could be calculated by using text-mining technics that apply on patents’ content. In this research Co-word as one of the text-mining techniques is used to explore technology areas and life cycles of them. In this study patents are gathered from USPTO as input of text-mining process. Hence by using clustering methods, the main technology areas in “Unmanned Underwater Vehicle” (UUV) system are recognized. Also the main future technological changes in UUV systems are forecasted. More over the TLC of these technology areas is defined by using S-Curve model.

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