As markets and industries continue to evolve rapidly, technology opportunity discovery (TOD) has become critical to a firm's survival. From a common consensus that TOD based on a firm’s capabilities is a valuable method for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and reduces the risk of failure in technology development, studies for TOD based on a firm’s capabilities have been actively conducted. However, previous studies mainly focused on a firm's technological capabilities and rarely on business capabilities. Since discovered technologies can create market value when utilized in a firm's business, a firm’s current business capabilities should be considered in discovering technology opportunities. In this context, this study proposes a TOD method that considers both a firm's business and technological capabilities. To this end, this study uses patent data, which represents the firm's technological capabilities, and trademark data, which represents the firm's business capabilities. The proposed method comprises four steps: 1) Constructing firm technology and business capability matrices using patent classification codes and trademark similarity group codes; 2) Transforming the capability matrices to preference matrices using the fuzzy function; 3) Identifying a target firm’s candidate technology opportunities using the collaborative filtering algorithm; 4) Recommending technology opportunities using a portfolio map constructed based on technology similarity and applicability indices. A case study is conducted on a security firm to determine the validity of the proposed method. The proposed method can assist SMEs that face resource constraints in identifying technology opportunities. Further, it can be used by firms that do not possess patents since the proposed method uncovers technology opportunities based on business capabilities.

As many existing research fields are matured academically, researchers have encountered numbers of academic, social and other problems that cannot be addressed by internal knowledge and methodologies of existing disciplines. Earlier, pioneers of researchers thus are following a new paradigm that breaks the boundaries between the prior disciplines, fuses them and seeks new approaches. Moreover, developed countries including Korea are actively supporting and fostering the convergence research at the national level. Nevertheless, there is insufficient research to analyze convergence trends in national R&D support projects and what kind of content the projects mainly deal with. This study, therefore, collected and preprocessed the research proposal data of National Research Foundation of Korea, transforming the proposal documents to term-frequency matrices. Based on the matrices, this study derived detailed research topics through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a kind of topic modeling algorithm. Next, this study identified the research topics each proposal mainly deals with, visualized the convergence relationships, and quantitatively analyze them. Specifically, this study analyzed the centralities of the detailed research topics to derive clues about the convergence of the near future, in addition to visualizing the convergence relationship and analyzing time-varying number of research proposals per each topic. The results of this study can provide specific insights on the research direction to researchers and monitor domestic convergence R&D trends by year.

This study examines earthquake-induced sloshing effects on liquid storage tanks using computation fluid dynamics. To achieve this goal, this study selects an existing square steel tank tested by Seismic Simulation Test Center at Pusan National University as a case study. The model validation was firstly performed through the comparison of shaking table test data and simulated results for the water tank subjected to a harmonic excitation. For a realistic estimation of the wall pressure response of the water tank, three recorded earthquakes with similar peak ground acceleration are applied:1940 El Centro earthquake, 2016 Gyeongju earthquake, and 2017 Pohang earthquake. Wall pressures monitored during the dynamic analyses are examined and compared for different earthquake motions and monitoring points, using power spectrum density. Finally, the maximum dynamic pressure for three earthquakes is compared with the design pressure calculated from a seismic design code. Results indicated that the maximum pressure from the El Centro earthquake exceeds the design pressure although its peak ground acceleration is less than 0.4 g, which is the design acceleration. On the other hand, the maximum pressure due to two Korean earthquakes does not reach the design pressure. Thus, engineers should not consider only the peak ground acceleration when determining the design pressure of water tanks.

Patent management activities are considered to play a key role for technology-based firms under the recent knowledge-based economies. This is because intellectual property, including patents, can act as a system for continuous profit generation by protecting firms’ products, processes and services. In Korea, healthcare industry is now regarded as one of the promising next generation industries. Despite the promise of healthcare industry, Korean healthcare product manufacturers are faced with turbulent business changes, such as market opening. Even though there are various industrial studies on the effect of patent management activities on firm outcome, previous studies have hardly paid attention to Korean healthcare product manufacturing firms. For this reason, this study identifies the effect of patent management activities, such as patenting activeness, technical excellence and cooperation degree, on firm outcomes, including financial profitability and firm growth, with respect to the Korean healthcare product manufacturers. In this study, we located 86 Korean healthcare manufacturing firms from KORCHAMBIZ and DART, and then collected the data of their patenting activities and outcomes between 2001 and 2013. By applying factor analysis and regression analysis, our empirical study found that firms’ patenting activeness has the significant positive relationship on firms’ financial profitability, and firms’ patenting activeness and technical excellence have the significant positive relationship on firms’ financial growth. Our study is an initial attempt to identify the effect of patent management activities on firm outcome within Korean healthcare product manufacturing industry, and thus its results can be used as the basis to formulate national policies for Korean healthcare product industry.

Technology-oriented national R&D programs produce intellectual property as their final result. Patents, as typical industrial intellectual property, are therefore considered an important factor when evaluating the outcome of R&D programs. Among the main components of patent evaluation, in particular, the patent right quality is a key component constituting patent value, together with marketability and usability. Current approaches for patent right quality evaluation rely mostly on intrinsic knowledge of patent attorneys, and the recent rapid increase of national R&D patents is making expert-based evaluation costly and time-consuming. Therefore, this study defines a hierarchy of patent right quality and then proposes how to quantify the evaluation process of patent right quality by combining text mining and regression analysis. This study will contribute to understanding of the systemic view of the patent right quality evaluation, as well as be an efficient aid for evaluating patents in R&D program assessment processes.

기술로드맵 (Technology RoadMap: TRM)은 전략적 기술기획 및 관리를 위한필수적인 도구이다. 최근 급속한 기술변화와 시장경쟁의 심화로 인해 TRM은 점차 중요시되고 있는데, 이는 TRM이 기업의 전략적 목적과 기술을 연계함으로써 장기적으로 필요한 기술들을 확보하기 위한 일종의 지도 역할을 하기 때문이다. 그러나 TRM을 개발하고 유지하기 위해서는 기술 전문가의 정성적 노력에 따른 많은 비용과 시간이 수반됨으로 인해, 기술문서의 자동화된 분석을 통해 TRM 개발 생산성을 높이는 방법에 대한 연구가 기업과 정부기관들의 최근 주요 관심사 중의 하나이다. 비록 TRM 개발을 위해 키워드 기반의 접근방법(Keyword-based Patent Analysis)이 제시된 바 있으나, 이 방법은 미리 정의된 키워드의 출현정보에만 기반하므로 기술요소들간의 명시적 연관관계를 담지 못한다. 즉, 키워드 기반의 접근은 기술의 목적, 구성, 효과 (Objective, Structure, Effect: OSE)에 대한 정보를 제공하지 못하기 때문에 기술로드맵핑 시 기술정보의 활용성 측면에서 한계점을 지닌다. 이에, 본 연구는 기능 (Function) 기반의 접근법을 활용한 기술로드맵핑 방법을 제시한다. 기능이란 기술의 OSE 정보를 담고 있으며 Subject-Action-Object (SAO) 구조로 표현될 수 있기 때문에, 본 연구에서 제시되는 방법은 기술문서의 자연어처리분석을 통해 기술의 OSE 정보를 추출하여 TRM을 개발할 수 있도록 한다. 본 연구의 방법을 연구개발 기획단계에 적용함으로 써, TRM 개발에 따른 비용과 시간의 절감이 가능하며, 제품이나 기술 OSE에 대한 연구개발 기획전문가의 시야를 넓혀 보다 효과적인 의사결정이 가능할 것으로 기대된다.