The Evolution of Interindustry Technology Linkage Topics and Its Analysis Framework in Three-Dimensional Printing Technology

The mutual influence and complementarity of technologies between different industries are becoming increasingly prominent. Revealing the topic evolution of technology linkages between industries is the foundation for understanding the technological development trend of the industry. Although numerous works have focused on technology topic mining and its evolution characteristics, these works have not accurately represented the interindustry technology linkage, analyze the related topics and even ignored the technological development characteristics hidden in the topic evolution pathway. Since the Lingo algorithm fully considers the time-series characteristics of the topics, and the knowledge evolution theory can reveal three inherent characteristics in the evolution of knowledge topics, namely, “stability, heredity, and variability,” this article aims to combine the Lingo algorithm and the knowledge evolution theory to analyze the topic evolution of interindustry technology linkages. Additionally, because three-dimensional (3-D) printing technology has significant interdisciplinary and cross-industry characteristics, a wide range of application fields, and various interindustry technology linkages, 3-D printing technology is used for empirical analysis. The empirical results show that the key topics of interindustry technology linkages in 3-D printing include model design, manufacturing methods, manufacturing equipment, manufacturing material, and application. In addition, all these topics have the development feature of heredity. However, the topic of manufacturing materials presents significant variability, the topic of manufacturing methods has the strongest stability, and multiple subtopics of the five topics show variability and genetic intersection.