Technological innovation is a dynamic process that spans the lifecycle of an idea, from scientific research to production. Within this process, there are few key innovations that significantly impact a technology’s development, and the ability to identify and trace the development of these key innovations comes with a great payoff for researchers and technology managers. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying the technology’s main evolutionary pathway of a technology. What is unique about this framework is that we introduce new indicators that reflect the connectivity and the modularity in the interior citation network to distinguish between the stages of a technology’s development. We also show how information about a family of patents can be used to build a comprehensive patent citation network. Last, we apply integrated approaches of main path analysis (MPA) -- namely global main path analysis and global key-route main analysis -- for extracting technological trajectories at different technological stages. We illustrate this approach with Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs), a low-cost solar cell belonging to the group of thin film solar cells, contributing to the remarkable growth in the renewable energy industry. The results show how this approach can trace the main development trajectory of a research field and distinguish key technologies to help decision-makers manage the technological stages of their innovation processes more effectively.
more »
« less
Insights into relationships between disruptive technology/innovation and emerging technology: A bibliometric perspective
More Like this
-
-
Wearables are a multi-billion-dollar business with more growth expected. Wearable technology is fully entrenched at multiple levels of athletic competition, especially at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and professional levels where these solutions are used to gain competitive advantages by assessing health and performance of elite athletes. However, through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) training experience, a different story emerged based on pilot interviews from coaches and trainers regarding the lack of trust in wearables, and how the technology falls short of measuring what practitioners need. An NSF I-Corps project was funded to interview over 100 strength and conditioning coaches (S&CCs) and athletic trainers (ATs) regarding the current state of wearables at the NCAA and professional levels. Through 113 unstructured interviews, a conceptual map of relationships amongst themes and sub-themes regarding wearable technology emerged through the grouping of responses into meaning units (MUs). Interview findings revealed that discussions by S&CCs and ATs regarding wearables could be grouped into themes tied to (a) the organizational environment, (b) the athlete, and (c) the analyst or data scientist. Through this project, key findings and lessons learned were aggregated into sub-themes including: the sports ecosystem and organizational structure, brand development, recruiting, compliance and gamification of athletes, baselining movement and injury mitigation, internal and external loads, “return tos,” and quantifying performance. These findings can be used by practitioners to understand general technology practices and where to close the gap between what is available versus what is needed.more » « less
-
In the context of a pandemic that has had wide-ranging negative impacts on preschool children’s socioemotional development it is important to consider uses of technology to support children re-engaging socially with peers. In this article, we review the landscape of systems to support children’s face-to-face collaboration and identify an underexplored approach that could be well suited for the current context: using technology in a peripheral role to support activities where the focus is on other children and non-electronic objects and where children are free to engage with the physical space around them with the support of adults. We then present a pre-pandemic evaluation of StoryCarnival, a system with these underexplored characteristics, designed to support preschool children’s sociodramatic play, for which there is evidence of numerous benefits that can positively impact children’s socioemotional development. The results of the evaluation comparing sociodramatic play with and without StoryCarnival’s support suggest that while not being the focus of the activity, StoryCarnival’s components changed the dynamics of play for the children in the study during our observations, such that children displayed more mature play characteristics. Our discussion includes implications for child-computer interaction and considerations for the pandemic context.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract Clean technologies aim to address climatic, environmental, and health concerns associated with their conventional counterparts. However, such technologies achieve these goals only if they are adopted by users and effectively replace conventional practices. Despite the important role that users play to accomplish these goals by making decisions whether to adopt such clean alternatives or not, currently, there is no systematic framework for quantitative integration of the behavioral motivations of users during the design process for these technologies. In this study, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) is integrated with usage-context-based design to provide a holistic approach for predicting the market share of clean versus conventional product alternatives based on users’ personal beliefs, social norms, and perception of behavioral control. Based on the mathematical linkage of the model components, technology design attributes can then be adjusted, resulting in the design of products that are more in line with users’ behavioral intentions, which can lead to higher adoption rates. The developed framework is applied in a case study of adoption of improved cookstoves in a community in Northern Uganda. Results indicate that incorporating TPB attributes into utility functions improves the prediction power of the model and that the attributes that users in the subject community prioritize in a clean cookstove are elicited through the TPB. Households’ decision-making behavior before and after a trial period suggests that design and marketing strategy should systematically integrate user’s behavioral tendencies prior to interventions to improve the outcomes of clean technology implementation projects.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- The DOI is not currently available.
