Technology forecasting (TF) is forecasting the future state of a technology. It is exciting to know the future of technologies, because technology changes the way we live and enhances the quality of our lives. In particular, TF is an important area in the management of technology (MOT) for R&D strategy and new product development. Consequently, there are many studies on TF. Patent analysis is one method of TF because patents contain substantial information regarding developed technology. The conventional methods of patent analysis are based on quantitative approaches such as statistics and machine learning. The most traditional TF methods based on patent analysis have a common problem. It is the sparsity of patent keyword data structured from collected patent documents. After preprocessing with text mining techniques, most frequencies of technological keywords in patent data have values of zero. This problem creates a disadvantage for the performance of TF, and we have trouble analyzing patent keyword data. To solve this problem, we propose an interval estimation method (IEM). Using an adjusted Wald confidence interval called the Agresti-Coull confidence interval, we construct our IEM for efficient TF. In addition, we apply the proposed method to forecast the technology of an innovative company. To show how our work can be applied in the real domain, we conduct a case study using Apple technology.

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Data reduction has been used widely in data mining for convenient analysis. Principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA) methods are popular techniques. The PCA and FA reduce the number of variables to avoid the curse of dimensionality. The curse of dimensionality is to increase the computing time exponentially in proportion to the number of variables. So, many methods have been published for dimension reduction. Also, data augmentation is another approach to analyze data efficiently. Support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is a representative technique for dimension augmentation. The SVM maps original data to a feature space with high dimension to get the optimal decision plane. Both data reduction and augmentation have been used to solve diverse problems in data analysis. In this paper, we compare the strengths and weaknesses of dimension reduction and augmentation for classification and propose a classification method using data reduction for classification. We will carry out experiments for comparative studies to verify the performance of this research.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop and validate a measurement tool for assessing organizational knowledge creation practices based on the socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization (SECI) processes of the knowledge creation theory.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from a sample of 455 knowledge workers from four Korean for‐profit organizations, utilizing a systematic procedure, which includes: initial item and domain development based on a comprehensive literature review, reliability assessment and item deduction, and construct validity and psychometric property assessment.FindingsResults show that 17 items related to individual and team members' practices of acquiring and sharing knowledge in organizational contexts measure the four domains of SECI knowledge creation practices.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough samples from Korean business settings indicate a limited generalizability, this study's theory‐grounded item specification and systematic procedure of scale development (i.e. descriptive statistics, reliability and inter‐correlation analysis, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis using the random split method) can be replicated in future similar studies or scale development research.Originality/valueScores at the individual, group, or firm level can be utilized for comparison or development purposes to promote the collaborative knowledge creation practices in organizations.

Technology analysis is one of the important tasks in technology and industrial management. Much information about technology is contained in the patent documents. So, patent data analysis is required for technology analysis. The existing patent analyses relied on the quantitative analysis of the collected patent documents. However, in the technology analysis, expert prior knowledge should also be considered. In this paper, we study the patent analysis method using Bayesian inference which considers prior experience of experts and likelihood function of patent data at the same time. For keyword data analysis, we use Bayesian predictive interval estimation with count data distributions such as Poisson. Using the proposed models, we forecast the future trends of technological keywords of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to know the future technology of AI. We perform a case study to provide how the proposed method can be applied to real areas. In this paper, we retrieve the patent documents related to AI technology, and analyze them to find the technological trend of AI. From the results of AI technology case study, we can find which technological keywords are more important or critical in the entire structure of AI industry. The existing methods for patent keyword analysis were depended on the collected patent documents at present. But, in technology analysis, the prior knowledge by domain experts is as important as the collected patent documents. So, we propose a method based on Bayesian inference for technology analysis using the patent documents. Our method considers the patent data analysis with the prior knowledge from domain experts.