Context–Problem Network and Quantitative Method of Patent Analysis: A Case Study of Wireless Energy Transmission Technology

Identification of prevalent problems is an important process of strategic innovation for stakeholders of trending technologies. This paper proposes a systematic and replicable method of patent analysis to identify problems to be solved requisite for sustainable technology planning and development, by implementing the concept of ‘context’ to facilitate problem identification. The main concept of the method entails the importance of the connections between contextual information and problems to provide more focused, relevant, and constructive insights essential for instating goals for research and development activities. These context–problem entities and their entwined connections are discovered using keyword pattern matching, grammar-based text mining, and co-word analysis techniques. The intermediary outputs are then utilized to generate the proposed context–problem network (CP net) for social network, grammar, and quantitative data analysis. For verification, our method was applied to 737 patents in the wireless energy transmission technology domain, successfully yielding CP net data. The detailed analysis of the resulting CP net data delivered meaningful information in the wireless charging technology field: The main contexts, “batteries”, “power transmission coils”, and “cores”, are found to be most relevant to the main problems, “maximizing coupling efficiency”, “minimizing DC signal components”, and “charging batteries”. The results provide a wide range of informative perspectives for individuals, the scientific community, corporate, and market-level stakeholders. Furthermore, the method of this study can be applicable to various technologies since it is independent of specific subject domains. Future research directions aim to improve this method for better quality and modeling of contexts and problems.