Exploring the nanotechnology landscape for competitive advantage: A Subject-Action-Object based text mining methodology for finding, selecting and evaluating nanotechnologies for innovation problem solving

Historically, nanotechnology faces the same challenges that every new, emerging and science-based industry faces. The transfer of viable knowledge from science to market needs to be bridged better. To enhance this transfer, a methodology is designed which integrates engineering design and subject-action-object (SAO) based text mining to find, select and evaluate nanotechnologies from scientific abstracts. A case study has been conducted for which the engineering design methods are used to structure a technical innovation problem in the manufacturing industry. 1.2 million abstracts from nanotechnology related articles are downloaded from the Web of Science and indexed based on technical function using SAO-parsing of the title and abstract. To this dataset, the methodology was applied to scout technologies solving a technical problem in the manufacturing industry. The performance of the designed methodology was measured based on precision and recall, as compared with standard scientific search retrieval technology. The methodology was evaluated on basis of structured interviews conducted with two engineering managers. The results demonstrate that the SAO methodology is a valuable assist to innovation and design within the firm. Significant challenges which are addressed in this article are for example knowledge loss due to SAO-parsing and information stickiness.
Technology, Policy and Management
Systems engineering, policy analysis and management