Study On Enterprise Technologies Of Fortune 500 Companies Based On Patent Co-citation Network

Enterprises are the main body of innovation, the competition among them has evolved into competing in production, dissemination and application of knowledge.Patent, being the innovation vector of science and technology, documents the pace of development of science and technology. Containing huge information resources, patents have great reference value to face pierce competitions and realize innovation. Through statistical analysis on patents counts, citations etc. and other important indicators, patents have become an important information source for tracking high-tech development of enterprises, thus, they are very valuable competitive intelligence for today's businesses in intense competition.In this paper, we summarize the development process of the patentmetrics, methods of patentmetrics and its application in competitive technical intelligence in the enterprise, and then advance ideas and research features for this paper. Fortune 500 companies are selected as the research object, whose data is indexed in Derwent Innovations Index from 1980 to 2009. Methods of patent forward citation, social network analysis and information visualization are employed to identify the distribution of technology fields of these enterprises, the evolution process for the technology landscape during the last 3 decades and the pivotal point in the large assignee co-citation network.From the results, we can see that the technology landscape network formed by sample enterprises obviously consists of several main clusters:Electronics, electrical equipment, IT cluster; Motor vehicles cluster; Chemicals cluster; Pharmaceuticals cluster; Household and Personal Products cluster; Aerospace and defense cluster, etc.. Three decades evolution network presents three feathers:An increasing number of firms get into the network. New clusters emerge, such as Food and Finance. Different industries and enterprises'technology tend to be integrative, such as merging of electronics and automotive etc..Three pivotal points in the network are explored deeply:GE, Dupoint, Oracle. From the analysis through IPC, GE is the typical case of diversified financials, Dupoint could supply the chemical materials with high quality for numerous fields. Establishing information technology platform for enterprises should be one of the main factors for Oracle's success,as the internet pervades.