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Are significant inventions more diversified?

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Abstract

This study aims at exploring whether significant inventions are more technologically diversified or have more diverse applications, investigating whether there are any innovation laws existing in R&D activities. Based on technology co-classification analysis, we select patent dataset meets the specific standard from the worldwide patent database named Derwent Innovations Index as sample dataset. Three indicators out of four verify the proposed hypotheses, i.e., significant inventions are more diversified in terms of individual invention. The fourth indicator implies that focusing on some core technology domains maybe better for creating significant inventions when R&D activities are considered as a whole. The results are of great theoretical significance by helping us identifying the diversified characteristic laws of significant inventions; moreover, they are of crucial practical meanings to R&D work and technology innovation activities etc.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the important comments. The research was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 71073015, 71103064, 71103022; Major Project of the National Social Science Fund of “Ethical issues of high-tech” under Grant No. 12&ZD117; Key Project of the National Social Science Fund of “Promoting the construction of socialist culture and powerful country” under Grant No. 13AZD016; the Project of Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (DUT14XXXX, undetermined).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Administration and Law, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116085, People’s Republic of China

    Chunjuan Luan, Haiyan Hou, Yongtao Wang & Xianwen Wang

  2. WISE Lab, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116085, People’s Republic of China

    Chunjuan Luan, Haiyan Hou, Yongtao Wang & Xianwen Wang

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  1. Chunjuan Luan
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  2. Haiyan Hou
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  3. Yongtao Wang
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  4. Xianwen Wang
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Correspondence to Chunjuan Luan.

Appendix

Appendix

See the Table 3.

Table 3 Total DC technology broad classifications (abbr. as broad DC) for data retrieving
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Luan, C., Hou, H., Wang, Y. et al. Are significant inventions more diversified?. Scientometrics 100, 459–470 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1303-x

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