Identifying first signals of emerging dominance in a technological innovation system: A novel approach based on patents

Actors of an early stage technological innovation system (TIS) need to carefully attend to future developments given the high strategic uncertainty that often prevails in such systems. Such uncertainty is a reflection of the different technology categories that exist as well as the highly dynamic character of such systems in general. It is only gradually, as a result, that dominance of one technology category emerges against alternative categories and uncertainty is thereby reduced. Nonetheless, there has been limited attention so far to how researchers can operationalize some of the preliminary signals in order to anticipate which technology category is likely to emerge. In this paper, we therefore focus on how such early signals can be detected, i.e. by drawing upon patents and their underlying technology classification. Towards this end, we introduce two novel indicators based on the classification codes of patents: the Patent Trajectory (PTt) indicator and the Category Concentration (CCt) indicator. Joint application of both indicators enables us to operationalize the seminal concept of the technology cycle from Tushman and Rosenkopf (1992), which is specifically translated to the domain of TIS by distinguishing between the evolutionary phases of a TIS. To operationalize our novel methodological framework, we specifically employ the case of algae, ultimately concluding that this particular TIS tends to evolve in the direction of pharmaceutical applications. In a narrow sense, this framework can thus help to better understand the context of the TIS for algae. More significantly, however, the demonstrated ability of our approach to anticipate the evolution and formation of technological innovation systems signifies a worthwhile contribution for the larger domain of forecasting and strategic management.