Identifying the Development Trends of Emerging Technologies Using Patent Analysis and Web News Data Mining: The Case of Perovskite Solar Cell Technology

Identifying the development trends of emerging technologies with disruptive potential as early as possible is crucial for enterprise research and development (R&D) investment planning and government R&D strategic planning. Many researchers have used academic papers and patent data to identify trends in emerging technologies, although they rarely have made use of web news data focused on emerging technologies. Web news contains a large amount of social awareness data that represents the public's sense of and response to emerging technologies, and the social awareness data is of great significance for identifying the development trends of emerging technologies. Therefore, this article presented a research framework to identify the development trends of emerging technologies using patent analysis and web news data mining. In the research framework, first, we have used patent analysis to analyze the evolution topics of these emerging technologies, and have applied the topic model to study the changing patterns of publics’ topics of concern regarding emerging technologies contained in web news. Second, we have made a comparison analysis of the results of patent analysis and the public’ sense of and response to emerging technologies contained in web news. Then, we have applied an improved sentiment analysis to study the changing patterns of publics’ expectations for emerging technologies contained in web news. Finally, by studying the changes in publics’ topics of concern and publics’ expectations for emerging technologies over time, we have identified the development trends of emerging technologies. The perovskite solar cells technology is used as a case study to analyze the effectiveness and feasibility of the framework. This article provides a new research perspective to identify technology trends, and contribute to the technology forecasting methodology.