Monitoring the emergence of emerging technologies helps managers and decision makers to identify development trends in emerging technologies is crucial for government research and development (R&D), strategic planning, social investment, and enterprise practices. Researchers usually use academic papers and patent data to identify and monitoring the trends of emerging technologies from a technological perspective, but they rarely make use of social media data (e.g., such as Twitter data) related to emerging technologies. Analysis of this social media data is of great significance to understand the emergence of emerging technologies and gain insight into development trends. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that uses patent analysis and Twitter data mining to monitoring the emergence of emerging technologies and identify changing trends of these emerging technologies. The perovskite solar cell technology is selected as a case study. In this case, we used patent analysis to monitoring the evolutionary path of perovskite solar cell technology. We applied Twitter data mining to analyze Twitter users’ sense of, response to, and expectations for this perovskite solar cell technology. We also identified the professional types of Twitter users and examined changes in their topics of interest over time to track the emergence of perovskite solar cell technology. We analyzed a comparison of the results of patent analysis and Twitter data mining to identify development trends of perovskite solar cell technology. This paper contributes to our understanding of how technologies emerge and develop, as well as the technology forecasting and foresight methodology, and will be of interest to solar photovoltaic technology R&D experts.

Introduction

In recent years, emerging technologies with disruptive characteristics have been rapidly emerging. Major technological advancements include information technology, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and new material technology. The emergence and development of these emerging technologies not only has changed existing industries but also has created new industries that have a significant impact on the socioeconomic structure (Day et al., 2000). Identifying future changing trends of these emerging technologies as early as possible is crucial for government and enterprise research and development (R&D) strategic planning to gain a first-mover advantage in the competitive business environment. Many managers and decision makers are aware of the significance of understanding of the emergence path, and identifying the future development trends of these emerging technologies for their organization’s competitiveness and sustainable development (Li et al., 2015). This strategic concern issue raises one question: Can we identify the future development trends of these emerging technologies given a better understanding of how they emerge? In response to this question, this paper develops a framework to monitoring the emergence of emerging technologies and identify future changes trends of these emerging technologies by using patent analysis and Twitter data mining.