Discovering Potential Technology Opportunities for Fuel Cell Vehicle Firms: A Multi-Level Patent Portfolio-Based Approach

Technology opportunity discovery (TOD) is an important technique to help fuel cell vehicle (FCV) firms keep market advantage and sustainable development. Under fierce competition in the new energy industry, there is an urgent necessity for innovative TOD methods to effectively identify technology opportunities for FCV firms. This study proposes a structured TOD framework with a multi-level identification process. Based on technology portfolio analysis, it fully integrates the firm’s technology level analysis, technology potential analysis and patent novelty analysis. A series of techniques such as LDA (latent Dirichlet allocation), MDS (multidimensional scaling) and LOF (local outlier factor) are also applied in the framework. A total of 14,858 granted patent data of the FCV industry containing 798 patents of the target firm were extracted from the Derwent Innovation Index database as the input data of the empirical study. The result shows that the framework can provide a more profound analysis for identifying technology opportunities, which offer more appropriate insights in both strategic and operational level technological decisions for technology-oriented firms.