Developmental Trajectories in Blockchain Technology Using Patent-Based Knowledge Network Analysis

Abstract

The blockchain is a technology with high growth potential that increases social benefits by streamlining procedures, reducing costs, and innovating the way we work. Considering the growth potential of blockchain technologies, countries around the world are attempting to graft into various fields such as finance, logistics, and healthcare, and actively promoting technology development. Tracing and analyzing the developmental trajectories of blockchain technology can give great insight for R&D direction and strategies. We developed an improved knowledge persistence-based main path approach to identify technological trajectories of the blockchain technology. In addition, future technological directions for each sub-technology under blockchain technology were identified by the knowledge unconventionality metric. The results show that the blockchain technology can be divided into five sub-technologies, and each subtechnology has evolved with high technological interactions among other sub-technologies. Based on the last knowledge streams of the main paths, this paper suggests potential future directions for each subtechnology in the blockchain technology.

Main Path Analysis to Filter Unbiased Literature

“…This main path is called the main path analysis based on knowledge persistence. He has conducted research in the blockchain domain, discovered five sub-blockchain domains and proposed the latest research issues [35]. By highlighting important patents and their development in this field, a patent-based analysis of the blockchain field is also carried out to filter out the innovation research trends of technologies and researchers [36].…”

Exploring Knowledge Trajectories of Accounting Information Systems Using Business Method Patents and Knowledge Persistence-Based Main Path Analysis

“…Patent citations are generally used as the most powerful and obvious information for assessing the technical and commercial value of patents. Many previous studies employed patent citation information for various purposes [9,11,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. Each citation represents knowledge flow between the citing and cited patents [23,27].…”

“…The limitation of KP-based main path analysis by Park and Magee [23] is that the main paths in the last layer sometimes are divergent. Kim, Yoon, Raghavan, Le, and Park [26] suggested the knowledge unconventionality (KU) metric to reduce the knowledge…”

Investigating Company’s Technical Development Directions Based on Internal Knowledge Inheritance and Inventor Capabilities: The Case of Samsung Electronics

“…This approach identifies the major knowledge flows within a knowledge network by minimizing the network complexity, and so it can show the major knowledge flows within a company. In addition, the last nodes in a main path can be the specific clues to predict future development directions [28]. Given that the technical capabilities of a company cannot be evolved in short time, but accumulated and inherited over time through continuous R&D activity, we adopted the knowledge persistence (KP)-based main path analysis, which can quantify how much knowledge of a patent was inherited to later inventions [23,29].…”