Identifying potential users of technology for technology transfer using patent citation analysis: a case analysis of a Korean research institute

The purpose of this study is to examine whether patent citation analysis can be used for making decisions of technology transfer. More precisely, the authors of this paper are interested in the matter of identifying potential users of technology by patent citation analysis. Previous research relied on patents’ keywords, and as a consequence it was difficult to implement in practice where organizations retain huge number of patents to transfer. In this study, we attempt to use IPCs instead of keywords. Our approach is to identify dominant IPC and sub-classes of an organization by applying co-classification analysis, and explore firms that cited the patents in the dominant IPC. Our view is that the organizations explored in this process can be potential users of technology. To verify our view, we examined the patents and technology transfer cases of two divisions in K Research Institute in Korea. The results show that our view was right only for a limited field. We suppose that the reasons may stem from technological characteristics and firm size effect. Therefore, we suggest that there should be further research considering technological characteristics and firm size.