How business methods accompany technological innovations – a case study using semantic patent analysis and a novel informetric measure

Abstract

Usually, the development of a technology interacts with the development of business methods, which are needed to enter the application fields. For some years now, it is possible to analyse their interaction as, next to technological innovations, business method innovations can be patented. To investigate this interplay, we select the case of radio frequency identification devices (RFID) – a technology that first emerged many years ago, but is still undergoing further development. We analyse approximately 37,000 patents related to RFID technology from the period between 1990 and 2014, differentiating between technological and business method patents, by means of bibliographic and semantic analyses, using one well established and one novel informetric measure. Contrary to our expectations, the results point to technological innovations that are not ensued but constantly accompanied by business methods. Furthermore, we identify two types of players, that is technology and application specialists. There is a clear distinction between these two types, though all companies of both types apply for technological as well as business method patents. As our semantic analysis reveals, RFID were successively introduced in their application fields between 1998 and 2008, starting with industrial applications, and then moving on to service applications. In future, technology managers should develop strategies based on the interaction between technological and business method patents, keeping in mind the early start and sequential development of different application fields.

Research on Patent Protection of Business Model under the Background of Internet

“…There are foreign scholars [4][5][6] studying the interaction between technology patents and business method patents and the relationship with the market. Due to the rapid development of Internet+, the sharing, openness, exclusivity and monopoly of big data coexist New technologies are constantly evolving, and different industries are constantly infiltrating, and business model innovation shows endless vitality [7].…”

Technological Drivers of Urban Innovation: A T-DNA Analysis Based on US Patent Data

“…According to Moehrle, Wustmans, and Gerken [28], we take out bi-grams (two-word concepts) in the window size of four (combining each word with another one in each four adjacent words in succession) from the full text of each patent of the core system in the period of 1976 to 2014 and from 2011 to 2014. This is implemented after cleaning patent data by removing punctuation marks and stop words as well as transforming all words into their basic forms.…”

“…Secondly, as Moehrle, Wustmans, and Gerken [28] suggest, the semantic analysis: term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) is applied in particular to the core system in order to identify important concepts in this system level and then, to explore new fields of buildings related to urban innovation in the four latest years (2011 to 2014) in comparison with the whole time frame (1976 to 2014).…”

“…In addition, Figure 2 also shows the development of patent counts in each system level year over year since 1976. As there is the time period between application and grant of a patent, which is normally 3 to 5 years [28], patent counts from 2015 forward are not complete. Hence, next steps will process the data till 2014.…”

Process excellence the key for digitalisation

“…The list of technologies within this digital era and its benefits for organisational performance includes items such as cyber-physical production systems (Lu and Xu, 2018), additive manufacturing (Deradjat and Minshall, 2017), Big Data (Yu et al , 2018), augmented reality (Xiao et al , 2018), radio frequency identification (Moehrle et al , 2018) and many more. Each of these technologies has real successful applications in the manufacture, logistics and industrial processes.…”