Technology is essential to innovation and economic prosperity. Understanding technological changes can guide innovators to find new directions of design innovation and thus make breakthroughs. In this work, we construct a technology fitness landscape via deep neural embeddings of patent data. The landscape consists of 1,757 technology domains and their respective improvement rates. In the landscape, we found a high hill related to information and communication technologies (ICT) and a vast low plain of the remaining domains. The landscape presents a bird's eye view of the structure of the total technology space, providing a new way for innovators to interpret technology evolution with a biological analogy, and a biologically-inspired inference to the next innovation.
翻译:了解技术变革可以引导创新者寻找设计创新的新方向,从而实现突破。在这项工作中,我们通过专利数据深层神经嵌入来构建一个技术健身环境。景观包括1,757个技术领域及其各自的改进率。在景观中,我们发现了一个与信息和通信技术(ICT)有关的高山,以及一个广大的低平原。景观展示了整个技术空间的结构,为创新者提供了一个以生物类比来解释技术演变的新途径,并为下一个创新提供了由生物启发的推论。