Nils C. Newman

• MS Technology and Science Policy
• Maastricht University

This mini-review arrays the pertinent tools and purposes of “Tech Mining” – shorthand for empirical analyses of Science, Technology and Innovation (ST&I) data. The intent is to introduce the range of tools, and show how they can complement each other. Tech Mining aims to generate powerful intelligence to help manage R&D and innovation processes. We...

This paper introduces a new measure of patent value – Maintenance Renewal Score (MRSc) – reflecting assignee valuing the patent by paying successive renewal fees. We generate MRSc's for nanotechnology patents issued by the US Patent Office from 1999 through 2009, with US assignees and US inventors. Patenting increases over this period, coincident w...

COVID-19 has been an unprecedented challenge that disruptively reshaped societies and brought a massive amount of novel knowledge to the scientific community. However, as this knowledge flood continues surging, researchers have been disadvantaged by not having access to a platform that can quickly synthesize emerging information and link the new kn...

While the COVID-19 pandemic morphs into less malignant forms, the virus has spawned a series of poorly understood, post-infection symptoms with staggering ramifications, i. e., long COVID (LC). This bibliometric study profiles the rapidly growing LC research domain [5,243 articles from PubMed and Web of Science (WoS)] to make its knowledge content...

This study investigates the effect of regulatory uncertainty on the translation of scientific discovery on emerging research topics to technical applications in science-driven industry. Our empirical analysis using the case of the US Federal Drug and Food Administration’s release of the report on the regulatory approach to nanomedicine in 2007 show...

Efforts to involve data science in policy analysis can be traced back decades but transforming analytic findings into decisions is still far from straightforward task. Data-driven decision-making requires understanding approaches, practices, and research results from many disciplines, which makes it interesting to investigate whether data science a...

Assessing corporate engagement with an emerging technology is essential for understanding the development of research and innovation systems. Corporate publishing is used as a system-level knowledge transfer indicator, but prior literature suggests that publishing can run counter to private sector needs for management of dissemination to ensure app...

We conducted a contest to predict highly active research topics. Participants analyzed ten years of Web of Science abstract records in a target technological domain (synthetic biology) so as to indicate cutting edge sub-topics likely to be actively pursued in the following two years. We describe contest procedures and results provided by thirteen p...

A new bibliometric technique enables one to distinguish high emergence topical content. This technique can be applied to sets of research publication abstracts reflecting a given technical domain (here, nanotechnology) to score cutting edge research terms. The resulting high emergence terms warrant special consideration in setting R&D priorities. T...

Indicators of technological emergence promise valuable intelligence to those determining R&D priorities. We present an implemented algorithm to calculate emergence scores for topical terms from abstract record sets. We offer a family of emergence indicators deriving from those scores. Primary emergence indicators identify “hot topic” terms. We then...

Developing useful intelligence on scientific and technological emergence challenges those who would manage R&D portfolios, assess research programs, or manage innovation. Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition Program has explored means to detect emergence via text...

Visual analytics has been increasingly used to help to better grasp the complexity and evolution of scientific and technological activities over time, across science and technological areas and in organisations. This chapter presents general insights into some important fields of expertise such as mapping, network analysis and visual analytics appl...

This study advances a four-part indicator for technical emergence. While doing so it focuses on a particular class of emergent concepts—those which display the ability to repeatedly maintain an emergent status over multiple time periods. The authors refer to this quality as staying power and argue that those concepts which maintain this ability are...

spotlight on 3 effective uses of Tech Mining (text analyses of Science, Technology & Innovation information resources)

EDITOR'S SUMMARY Focusing on graphene, a material made from carbon atoms, researchers constructed a map illustrating the material in the context of scientific developments and patent activity over time. Two basemaps reflecting general science and patent activity were created, in addition to two overlay maps reflecting scientific publication and pat...

This paper presents a new global patent map that represents all technological categories, and a method to locate patent data of individual organizations and technological fields on the global map. This overlay map technique can support competitive intelligence and policy decision-making. The global patent map is based on similarities in citing-to-c...

Topic modeling is a type of statistical model for discovering the latent "topics'' that occur in a collection of documents through machine learning. Currently, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a popular and common modeling approach. In this paper, we investigate methods, including LDA and its extensions, for separating a set of scientific publi...

Research that integrates the social and natural sciences is vital to address many societal challenges, yet is difficult to arrange, conduct, and disseminate. This paper compares diffusion of the research supported by a unique U.S. National Science Foundation program on Human and Social Dynamics ("HSD") with a matched group of heavily cited papers....

Tech Mining seeks to extract intelligence from Science, Technology & Innovation information record sets on a subject of interest. A key set of Tech Mining interests concerns which R&D activities are addressed in the publication and patent abstract records under study. This paper presents six “term clumping” steps that can clean and consolidate topi...

We are developing indicators for the emergence of science and technology (S&T) topics. To do so, we extract information from various S&T information resources. This paper compares alternative ways of consolidating messy sets of key terms [e.g., using Natural Language Processing on abstracts and titles, together with various keyword sets]. Our proce...

The global science, technology and innovation (STI) system is characterized by some researchers as a complex adaptive system (e.g. Heimricks, 2009). Scientific and technological progress entails both evolutionary and revolutionary change, with a high degree of non-linearity and unpredictability. In the terms of complexity science, this progress is...

To assess the success of the National Science Foundation's Research Coordination Network (RCN) program, a set of publication measures and visualization tools were used to determine how effective the program is in enhancing interdisciplinary publication and information sharing. The publication patterns of a set of researchers were compared before an...

We are developing indicators for the emergence of science and technology (S&T) topics. We are targeting various S&T information resources, including metadata (i.e., bibliographic information) and full text. We explore alternative text analysis approaches - principal components analysis (PCA) and topic modeling - to extract technical topic informati...

Open Innovation presses the case for timely and thorough intelligence concerning research and development activities conducted outside one’s organization. To take advantage of this wealth of R&D, one needs to establish a systematic “tech mining” process. We propose a 5-stage framework that extends literature review into research profiling and patte...

Western European nations, along with the USA and Japan, have been recognised as the world's most competitive economies. Eastern European nations have generally been considered to lag. This paper explores whether these descriptions remain accurate and the prospects for change over the coming decade. The Georgia Tech ‘High Tech Indicators’ (HTI) cont...

This paper compares three selected indicator series that address national, technology-based competitiveness. The "traditional" Georgia Tech High Tech Indicators (HTI) have been comparing 33 nations with respect to current and future prospects at exporting high tech products since the late 1980's. Those indicators blend expert opinion with statistic...

People often look to technology-based advancement as the key to achieving and maintaining economic competitiveness. This belief often resonates through national policy at the highest levels. Does investing in high technology really provide a competitive advantage? Since 1986, researchers at Georgia Tech's Technology Policy and Assessment Center hav...

This chapter introduces text mining of patents in support of technology management. Technological innovation models point to empirical measures that relate to prospects for successful commercialisation. We present an 8-step process for analysing entire patent sets on a given topic to generate such ‘innovation indicators.’l We illustrate for the cas...

The challenges faced by the empirical technology analysts in educating the managers on technology management is discussed. The decision makers tend to follow the familiar sources and to go away from empirical analysis which is less familiar. The empirical analysts need to give equal importance to presentations as given to their innovative works to...

We analyze samples of EPA research projects concerning endocrine disruptors and ecosystem indicators. Prior collaboration among researchers predicts effective teaming well. The projects are quite productive in terms of resulting publications and citations. We assess project-related publication in two ways: in the context of overall publication by t...

How can national capabilities to develop emerging technologies be measured? We use INSPEC and EI Compendex class codes to examine 33 countries' research and development activity. We select candidate emerging technologies based on the Rand Corporation's categories. We screen these to tally those that show strong recent, and increasing, R&D publicati...

The Technology Policy and Assessment Center at Georgia Institute of Technology, primarily with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), has been working on "High Tech Indicators" of national technological competitiveness since 1987. This paper summarizes the Technology Competitiveness Indicators for 33 nations in 1999 and provides v...

Georgia Tech's Technology Policy and Assessment Center, with support from the US National Science Foundation, has been generating High Tech Indicators (HTI) -- measures of national technology-based export competitiveness since 1987. This paper reports the HTI results for 33 nations in 1999 in comparison with those of 1990, 1993, and 1996.

Georgia Tech's Technology Policy and Assessment Center, with support from the US National Science Foundation, has been generating High-Tech Indicators (HTI) — measures of national technology-based export competitiveness since 1987. This paper reports the HTI results for 33 nations in 1999 in comparison with those of 1990, 1993 and 1996. HTI include...

Information mining generates many potentially valuable information products. However, there are many difficulties in technology professionals and managers making use of those products. This paper identifies a number of issues and promising steps to remedy them.

Counting research and development publication and patent activity can help generate competitive technical intelligence. Combining such counts with content analyses oriented toward “innovation success factors” can greatly enrich the intelligence value. The authors offer a framework of three types of technological innovation indicators—life cycle, co...

Summary form only given. Management of national research and development balances scientific freedom to explore areas of greatest excitement with economic payoff potential. To the extent that government funds R&D with taxpayer monies, the focusing of these efforts on domains of national priority may be in order. This analysis examines how Malaysian...

Summary form only given. “High-tech indicators” work at Georgia Tech (USA), begun in 1987, has proceeded through three developmental phases (1988, 1991, 1993), and “graduated“ in 1996 from development to periodic production of the indicator series. This paper presents some selected results obtained during the most recent phase of indicator research...

Georgia Tech, with support from the National Science Foundation, has now completed a decade of development of indicators of national high technology competitiveness. This paper reports on the standing, emphasis, and rate of change of high tech competitiveness for 28 nations. Results show strong standing for the '4 Asian tigers', comparable to many...

This article presents some of the major results obtained during the third phase of a continuing research effort to develop and implement national indicators of competitiveness in high technology industries. The first phase, begun in 1987, developed a conceptual model of the processes by which industrializing nations gain access to external technolo...

The lunar dump hitch is a device to connect any number of the two-wheeled lunar dump trucks together into a train configuration. It consists of three major components: a flexible member, a boom, and a hitch mechanism. The flexible member is centered in a cutout of the dump bed and is designed to flex to provide the necessary articulation for the in...

Beginning in the late 1980's the Technology Policy and Assessment Center (TPAC) at Georgia Tech has been measuring the capability of nations to compete in technology-enabled exports. The resulting "High Tech Indicators" (HTI) contribute to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Science & Engineering Indicators. 1 Our focus has been on the rapid...

M.S. J. David Roessner