Anticipating Future Innovation Pathways Through Large Data Analysis [Hardcover]

This book aims to identify promising future developmental opportunities and applications for Tech Mining. Specifically, the enclosed contributions will pursue three converging themes:

• The increasing availability of electronic text data resources relating to Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I).
  
• The multiple methods that are able to treat this data effectively and incorporate means to tap into human expertise and interests.
  
• Translating those analyses to provide useful intelligence on likely future developments of particular emerging S&T targets. 
  

Tech Mining can be defined as text analyses of ST&I information resources to generate Competitive Technical Intelligence (CTI). It combines bibliometrics and advanced text analytic, drawing on specialized knowledge pertaining to ST&I. Tech Mining may also be viewed as a special form of Big Data analytics because it searches on a target emerging technology (or key organization) of interest in global databases. One then downloads, typically, thousands of field-structured text records (usually abstracts), and analyses those for useful CTI.  Forecasting Innovation Pathways (FIP) is a methodology drawing on Tech Mining plus additional steps to elicit stakeholder and expert knowledge to link recent ST&I activity to likely future development. 

A decade ago, we demeaned Management of Technology (MOT) as somewhat self-satisfied and ignorant.  Most technology managers relied overwhelmingly on casual human judgment, largely oblivious of the potential of empirical analyses to inform R&D management and science policy.  CTI, Tech Mining, and FIP are changing that. The accumulation of Tech MinilÌ