The New Method of Identification of Technological Opportunities for Enterprises

Currently, companies still rely heavily on expert knowledge when searching for technological opportunities and choosing partners. In this chapter, the automation of the search for patent holders who can be partners of enterprises of the Volgograd region (solve similar technological problems) is considered. Moreover, companies are considered as partners not only from Russia, but also from China, India, and other friendly countries. The process of identifying partners is based on the similarity of solved technological problems extracted from patent documents, the patent holders of which are these enterprises. By analyzing the dependency trees extracted from the patent fields “Technical field” and “Title of patent”, the “Problem–Solution” structures are formed. Based on the analysis of patent documents of potential partners, “Problems-Solutions” that are not patented in Russian patents are identified, thereby defining a “technological vacuum” for enterprises of the Russian Federation. The theoretical value of the work lies in the developed method of identifying technological capabilities based on the analysis of the world patent array. The novelty of the method, which provides a search for potential vacant technological areas for key enterprises of the Volgograd region, is the use of deep learning technologies in relation to the analysis of natural language data of the world patent array. The practical significance of the work lies in the developed software module for finding technological opportunities for enterprises of the Volgograd region based on the similarity of solved technological problems. The developed module is programmatically implemented in Python, the Yargy library from the Natasha project was used for semantic analysis of text fields of patents, deep–translator was used for translating patent documents into Russian, stanza library was used for building dependency trees, and RuWordNet library was used for selecting hyperonyms (to account for synonymous words). To identify technological opportunities for enterprises of the Volgograd region, 6,785 patents were analyzed.