Development of new technologies is essential for companies trying to keep up with more and more demanding market trends. To enable efficient development numerous analysis are being performed in order to get a transparent picture of the current state of the market and its future potential. Patent bases represent a complete and well organized source of information useful for such analysis. Containing the most relevant technology data they make a valuable base for technology development research. Conclusions that can be crucial for time planning of a product and prediction of its success can easily be made by analyzing patent and technology evolution. Besides quantitative calculations, a range of qualitative methods can be applied for such analysis. By visualization of the qualitative data, messy and complicated information can be presented in a more transparent way. In this thesis, methods for innovation analysis have been presented in order to provide better insight into evolution of specific technology and create conditions in which technology development modelling can be performed. All the patents relevant for the studied field (safety ski bindings) were gathered and data important for further analysis is extracted out of their content. In the first phase of analysis, quantitative measures which indicate the changes in the studied field were calculated. The successive step builds upon quantitative calculations, creating a patent citation network aiming revelation of evolution flow. In the following step key word network was created by using the patent key words. That provided a good insight into contextual technology evolution. Both networks are presented dynamically. The results that followed out of this analysis were used to create an evolution model which helped to identify technologies that contributed the most to the development of the studied field.
Eva Potočki
2016
Master thesis
