Indicators of Technological Emergence

Search Technology Inc, Norcross GA

Investigators

Abstract

Extensive ways to measure research and development activity exist, but there is a gap in being able to measure frontier research topics. This project develops new indicators of technological emergence to support researchers, research managers, businesses, and others in identifying key topics at the frontiers of science and technology. Distinguishing cutting edge research and development activities can inform strategy development and reveal new opportunities. Being able to measure emergent topics additionally enables sharper research program assessment. Indicators of which countries, organizations, or individuals are contributing most to advances in a given domain provide vital competitive technical intelligence. The project's new technological emergence indicators focus on frontier contributions to complement general science, technology, and innovation indicators. We formulate a suite of indicators, develop software routines to calculate them, and devise reports and visualizations to communicate to different audiences, including researchers, managers, and policy makers. The project implements a four-attribute model of what constitutes technological emergence. Emergent topics should evidence term novelty, persistence, and accelerating growth, plus show formation of a research community. The approach extracts records on given science and technology topics from global research publication and patent databases. The research experiments with different ways to clean and consolidate those records' topical content. Then the project devises software scripts to score topics' degree of emergence. The computational algorithm then scores actors in given research areas, such as research organizations or countries, based on the extent to which the actors work on the highly emerging topics. The makeup of the scores and how they behave is then studied through nine diversified science and technology case studies. Testing includes a series of sensitivity analyses across fields and time periods. The testing seeks to validate the emergence indicators by analyzing their performance in predicting research and development activity in a subsequent one-to-three-year period. These new technological emergence indicators will be examined in conjunction with established science and technology metrics to help assess research and development capabilities and opportunities. The project will explore ways to apply the emergence indicators, such as gauging how government funding programs advance cutting edge research topic activity, or tracking diffusion of topical content from research to patents to commercialization arenas. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.