| The 18th National Congress of the Party of China put forward the innovation driven development strategy, and stress that the scientific and technological innovation ability has become the key factor to decide a country’s national power and its status in the world. The new evolution of science and technical revolution is accelerated, the international industrial division is adjusted, and the disruptive technologies continue to emerge. In the intense competition, the country has to carry on independent scientific and technological innovation.The technical innovation studies help discover the basic rule of mutual transformation of scientific knowledge and technological achievements,clear the foresightedness and fundamental effect of science, and clarify the technology’s function as tools in the scientific development. The relationships of scientific knowledge development to technological development are widely recognized as one of the most important and complex aspects of technical innovation. It could help reveal the basic relationships between science and technology,and identify the barriers in science technicalization. Only realize the relevancy and the difference of science and technology, one could support the national and enterprise’s R&D activity fundamentally, formulate the correct scientific and technological policy, grasp the core technology frontier and face the challenge of international market.At the moment, great achievements have been made related to the issues about the relationship between science and technology, and the trajectory of technological evolution. But most of them are qualitative researhes. With the development of science and technology, the scientific and technological systems are more and more complex, and the boundary between them is inceasingly obscure. Thus qualitative study could not master the features of science and technology. Though there are some quantitative researches about these problems,some key issues still need to be solved:What objective data allow one to understand the relationship between science and technology? How are these temporal effects moderated by differences intechnological domains? How does the impact of science on technology change over time? How to study the technology trajectory in a technological domain? Here these questions are analyzed through broad examination of citations made in patents to scientific papers.Fistly, in this research, we follow Magee et al. and define a technological domain as "A technologically differentiated field that includes technological artifactsthat meet a specific functional requirement or purpose using knowledge of a distinct scientific/technical field", and take advantage of a newly developed patent search technique [the Classification Overlap Method or COM] to define 44 diverse technological domains along with highly relevant and complete patent sets representing each of these domains. Overall, there are 605, 212 total patents in these 44 domain groupings. In this work, we utilize the scientific paper citations generated by these patent sets to test if the scientific distance or separation among scientific disciplines is correlated with technological distance among technological domains.Support for this hypothesis is found by analysis of the complex but differentiated scientific citation patterns for technological domains. The analysis of these patterns proceeds by calculation of vectors for science as determined by the 176 scientific categories defined for publications by the JCR (Journal Citation Reports by Thomson Reuters) and the 18 super-disciplines defined by Rafols et al.The key findings are:Firstly, the overall structure of the links found between scientific categories and technological domains is many-to-many rather than focused: specific domains cite a wide variety of scientific categories (in 2010 the average number of scientific categories cited by the 44 individual technological domains studied was 36),and some scientific categories are cited in a variety of domains (124 scientific categories are cited in 30% or more of the 44 domains over the period studied, 1976-2013);Secondly, we find some scientific categories are fairly widely cited in all domains (for example, interdisciplinary materials science), and some categories are very narrowly but highly cited (for example, nuclear medicine and medical imaging)and 65categories that are not highly cited in any of these 44 domains;Thirdly, The study uses the science vectors to place the 44 domains on a technological map. This map indicates (by comparison to technology maps based only on patent class co-citations) that a significant portion -but not all- of the distances between specific technologies arise due to the distance between the scientific categories that are most important to these specific technologies. The results indicate that differences in purpose may make some contribution to distance between technological domains but that much of the technical knowledge underlying a specific technological domain is captured by the scientific categories cited by patents from that domain. Besides, a Pearson correlation of 0.595 is found between technological relatedness among technological domains based upon scientific categories and technological knowledge respectively. These evidence support the hypothesis 1.Secondly, the 44 technological domains and the overall US Patent System(USPS), and their citations are used to test if the technological structure and scientific structure co-evolve. We find significant increases in the amount of scientific paper citation by patents over this time period. And this research also analyze the relationships between 44 technological domains and their scientific citations.The key findings are:Firstly, the results reveal that the overall change of cited scientific categories by all patents in 1980-2010 is uniform and gradual. And the greatest increases in patent citations were to scientific papers in the super-disciplines of bio-medicine and software and that these increases were greatest during the 1990’s; Secondly, growth in the number of patents in a technological domain and growth in the number for scientific papers in the scientific super-discipline that is the most highly cited by patents in the domain are strongly correlated for some domains;Thirdly, the growth of patents and growth of scientific papers in the dominant super-discipline shows some strongly correlated domains. The growth of patents is exponential (19 of 44 domains),the exponent for growth of papers in the top scientific categories has a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.617 with the exponent for patent growth. These pieces of novel evidence indicate that the hypothesiszed co-evolution of science and technology is supported.Thirdly, this study combines the genetic approach and patent direct citation relationship, and identifies the technological clusters that are "emerging" and important to the present technology. Then apply this method into two technological domains: Camera Sensitivity and MRI. The results show that this method could reveal the technology trajectory accurately and efficiently.There are clear indications that the selection of scientific projects for funding and the selection of scientific disciplines for funding are influenced by technological need and opportunity. On the other hand, finding a broad diversity of scientific disciplines contributing to different specific technological domains is a strong step in documenting the interaction of broad fields of science with the technological enterprise. In addition, the trends over time found among scientific super-disciplines cited by patents accords well with the overall idea that new technological directions correlate with new scientific directions since increases in the importance of software("info")and biological-based technologies ("bio")are widely noted as growth areas over the past few decades. In this case,our results quantify effects that were previously indicated qualitatively. At last, our study also improves the method to identify the technology development trajectory. To sum up, our study has important meaning to understanding the interaction of science and technology, enriching the technical innovation theory and grasping the evolution path of core technology, and thus supporting the R&D activity of state and companies fundamentally for better facing the challenge of international market. |
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