Investigating the effect of diversity of patent technological roots on technological catch-up: A case study of solar energy technologies

Nourizadeh, Mahboubeh; Saheb, Tahereh; Sahraei, Shaghayegh; Maleki, Ali

doi:10.22034/jtd.2021.249855

Investigating the effect of diversity of patent technological roots on technological catch-up: A case study of solar energy technologies

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

mahboubeh nourizadeh ¹

Tahereh Saheb ²

Shaghayegh Sahraei ²

Ali Maleki ³

¹ PhD Candidate/Tarbiat Modares University

² Tarbiat Modares University/IT Management Group

³ Head of Sharif Policy Research Institute (SPRI)

10.22034/jtd.2021.249855

Abstract

Green industries and renewable energy have been considered because of various issues such as global warming and the need to meet the growing energy needs of communities, especially in recent years, and researchers believe that the transition to greener economies and industries is primarily centered on the role of technological change and evolution. This technological evolution is usually accomplished by problem-solving activities that integrate different sciences from the same or different fields of technology and take advantage of the cumulative nature of knowledge. Given the necessity and importance of the development of renewable technologies, the purpose of this study is to investigate the diversity of knowledge of technological roots in the development of these technologies and the impact of this diversity on the technological catch-up of countries active in this field. Since solar energy is the largest source of renewable energy production in the world, technologies in this field were selected as the study. This research is an applied type of Technometrics and was performed using the patent citation analysis method. In order to conduct the research, in the first step, patents in the field of solar energy in the period 1980 to 2016 were obtained from the Derwent patent database. In the next step, the backward citations of each patent were extracted. In the third step, the number of different technology classes related to this field was identified, and using the index, the originality of each patent was calculated using the R language and aggregated at the national level. In the fourth step, the trend of originality index for successful countries was achieved. Finally, regression modeling showed that for both China and South Korea, the originality of knowledge and the diversity of technological roots were positively correlated with technological catch-up. In the end, the conclusion and research suggestions were presented.

Keywords

Solar Renewable Energy

Green Industries

Technological Catch-up

Technological Diversity

Knowledge Originality

Technological Classes

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