An Empirical Study of Nanowire Technological Trends

This paper follows a bibliometric method for nanowire case to make evident the technological trends; to present the relationship between patents; to help the researchers to discover relatively significant patents and to analyse important relationships between patents to identify those with most commercial potential and those which are critical technologies. This research focuses on the nanowire case study due to fact that this field is one of the most mature nanostructures and is one of the highly invested fields in nanotechnology. In terms of methodological approach, this study uses a different patent collection method than previous studies. This new method offers a new taxonomy that could make a significant impact on accurate patent data quests and increase the reliability of the patent analyses. As patent data are valuable sources of technology innovation and for forecasting technical change, this study utilises nanowire patent documents to pick out the technological trends, to identify nanowire technologies which both have the most commercial potential and which are critical at the organisational, national and international levels.