Multi-layer Complex Network-based General Purpose Technology Recognition

In the age of information technology,technologies update quicker.The market environment is fiercely competitive,and technological innovation has become an important way for countries or companies to improve their core competitiveness.General purpose technology,as a pre-competitive technology,is in a fundamental position in the entire process of technological innovation and can provide technical support for the development of one or more industries.Faced with limited technology resources,identifying general purpose technologies quickly and accurately has become a key issue for countries and enterprises to increase their technological innovation efficiency.General purpose technology is different from common technology in that it has the characteristics of basic,externality,and relatedness.The identification of these characteristics involves the "multiple" homogenous and heterogeneous relationships among technology,R&D subject,and technology field.How to effectively display these relationships is the focus of general purpose technology identification research.Based on patent data,this paper proposes a method for identifying general purpose technology based on multilayer complex network.Two steps are included:(1)The construction of multilayer complex network.Based on the multiple types of homogenous and heterogeneous relationships among the three types of feature items(international patent classification codes,technologies,and patent assignees),multiple co-occurrence analysis and multilayer complex network methods are used to construct a three-layer network of fields,technologies and entities.(2)On the base of the multilayer complex network,the method for identifying general purpose technology is developed.Initially,in terms of the characteristics of general purpose technology,the identification process is divided into three levels,i.e.,basic technology identification,elementary technology identification and relatedness technology identification.The topological structure,the layer relevance of multilayer complex network,and overlapping community division are combined to identify three kinds of technological characteristics.Further,a standard deviation method is used to weight the three types of technological characteristics and obtain the comprehensive generic score of each technology.To verify the effectiveness of this method,we apply our method to the case of Chinese intelligent identification technology.Compared with the traditional general purpose technology identification method,this research contributes from the following three aspects:(1)In the patent analysis method,the multi-layer complex network is used to evaluate the "multiple" relationships among field,technology and subject,which makes up the deficiency of single layer network that can only study single relationship,and realizes the analysis of the multiple relationships in technology identification research;(2)In the recognition principle of general purpose technology,this paper fully investigates the multiple characteristics of general purpose technology from three aspects: technology basic,technology externality and technology relatedness;(3)In the analysis of technology aggregation,exploiting an overlapping community classification algorithm to explore the community phenomenon among technologies and obtain fruitful results for understanding related community structure and technological combination.