Study On The Technical Competitors Identification Based On Patent Network Analysis Method

The characteristic of the patent makes it irreplaceable in strategic management, patent value evaluation and competence advantage analysis. Patent document includes the progress of how one branch of the technology developed. The status of the patent usage can also reflect the operation ability of the organization. Traditional market competition theory emphasis on the competitor identification, therefore, series of theories and methods were appeared, including SWOT analysis,5-strength models, which could help entrepreneur understand competitor in a strategic way. As the market getting fiercer, competitor analysis starts to concentrate on a more detail extent. As a result, the conventional competitor hypothesis is not impeccable. In reality, the identification of the competitor is an active progress, which requires detail-oriented, self-concentrated examination. As a consequence, the traditional analysis methods of competitor, patent statistics analysis method could not work out properly and a new approach is desired. So this paper is under such a background.The first chapter is literature review. In this paragraph, the author discusses the competitive intelligence, competitor, competitor analysis model, competitor identification methods, characteristics and standards of the competitor identification and the difficulties of the competitor identification. And this section is also the foundation of the next chapter on discussing how to identifying competitors.In Chapter two, the author describes the research progress of the competitive technical intelligence and explores the difference characteristics between competitive technical intelligence and competitive intelligence based on the theory of competitive technical intelligence, as well as how to organize the research method for the technical competitors. Meanwhile, this paper shows the several existing methods of technical competitor identification, including:dynamic completion theory analysis, quantitative analysis such as patent statistics and patent coupling analysis. In addition, the author also introduces some algorithms like K-means method and the decision tree method.Chapter three is the theoretical basis of the entire paper. In this section, the author presents the basic theory of patent cooperation networks, the patentee citation network and patent litigation network, the method of network construction, the indicators of visualization and measurement from the introduction of patent information analysis (include:concepts, categories, feature, functions, shortcomings, resource allocation and process) and the theory basis of patent network analysis methods (include:social network analysis, the characteristics of analysis method and data expression).Chapter four is the empirical research. In this part, the author describes the whole process of the patent network analysis based on the patent data of disc, including patent data acquisition, patent data cleansing, basic statistical analysis of patent data (especially:patentee/technical cross-analysis, patentee/year cross-analysis), and then, based on the above study, the paper conduct the technical competitors identification by Core-periphery Structure Analysis, community analysis, network centrality analysis. Then, identify the technical competitors under the perspective of overall network from three different types of network which are the patent cooperative network, the patentee citation network and patent litigation network. Eventually, with the perspective of self-centered network from TOSHIBA, the author analyze the technical competitors identify from the three different network.Chapter five summarizes the entire research and discusses the expectation of the future development in related fields.