With the development of Web 2.0, the importance of technology planning based on the users’ perceptive value has been increased as well as technological worth. Previous studies also focused on the both technology push and demand pull in technology innovation. However, there are limitations since they only suggested conceptual models without empirical study. Also, Studies about opinion mining, which analyses the opinion if it is positive or not, focused on the way how new approach to mine the text data in terms of mining method. It is necessary to apply the opinion mining to other fields such as technology planning and exploring technology opportunities.
In addition, technology opportunities in terms of convergence using different technologies from various areas begins to make a mark in the recent technology development environment that requires highly advanced technology with keen competition to survive. Especially business field tries to investigate technology opportunities from the heterogeneous area, outside of the objective technology areas, in order to overcome the limited technological competence in the homogeneous technology field, inside of the target technology areas.
In order to surmount the previous researches, this study defines users’ needs using opinion mining and explores technology opportunities, analyzing patent data from heterogeneous area based on the users’ needs. At first, users’ needs are defined by collecting free-response users’ reviews in the specific web site related to the objective technologies which are primarily defined. Using opinion data from web site, main topics in the review documents are derived with the value of sentiment, indicating whether the opinion is positive or negative, by means of supervised LDA (Latent Dirichlet allocation), a combined method with sentiment analysis and LDA. Each topics are evaluated by examining importance-satisfaction matrix.
In the next step, technologies in the homogeneous and heterogeneous area are evaluated by the patent evaluation index. In order to analyze both areas of technologies, patent data are collected in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Patents are classified into groups using clustering method for each domain technology and each clustered technology group are analyzed for their technological competences using patent indexes such as technology activities, influences and market forces. Patent analysis will be utilized as an evaluation material in the following step.
Lastly technology opportunities from heterogeneous fields are explored by linking users’ needs and technologies based on the similarities between needs and patent documents. Technology opportunities on the basis of heterogeneous areas are defined as when technologies in homogeneous areas cannot satisfy users’ needs because of absence or shortage of related technologies.
Furthermore, methodology, in this study, to explore technology opportunities from heterogeneous fields based on the users’ opinion is applied to the automotive industries especially for the door problem. The research results contributed to the academic areas by suggesting empirical method that integrating both perspectives of market and technology, especially for the heterogeneous fields. Also developed methodologies support to strategic technology planning and development reflecting users’ opinion from different field’s technologies.