ldentification and Prediction of Core Technologies in China’s Vaccine Field Based on Patent Dimension

Ma Junhong,Liu Xinrui,Ding Wenqing,Yuan Hongmei

(School of Business Administration,Shenyang Pharmaceutical University,Shenyang 110016,China)

Abstract Objective To study the core technology in the field of vaccines from the perspective of patents,so as to provide reference for China’s vaccine research and development (R&D) enterprises when formulating development strategies.Methods Social network analysis combined with various central indicators was used to identify the core technologies in the vaccine field and the market value of the identified core technologies was evaluated through recency-frequency-monetary (RFM) customer market value assessment model.Finally,the Condorcet voting method was applied for prediction.Results and Conclusion At present,the core technology of the vaccine field is concentrated in A61P31,which has both technical and market value with great potentials.Based on this,this paper proposes that China’s vaccine industry should shift the focus of R&D from the disease treatment to prevention.R&D enterprises should also follow the overall development trend to carry out vaccine R&D activities.

Keywords:core technology; technology prediction; social network analysis; Condorcet voting method

1 Introduction

With the convening of the Eleventh Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People’s Congress,the “Vaccine Management Law of the People’s Republic of China” (hereinafter referred to as the “Vaccine Management Law”) was enacted for the first time in China’s history and officially implemented on December 1,2019.The introduction of the “Vaccine Management Law” reflects the government’s emphasis on the comprehensive safety of vaccines.The “Vaccine Management Law” fully embodies the four strictest legislative purposes,namely:the strictest standard,the strictest supervision,the severest punishment,and the severest accountability.Based on the above background,this research intends to identify and predict the core technologies of China’s vaccine industry from the perspective of patents,so as to contribute to the development of China’s vaccine industry.Up to now,many domestic scholars and institutions have begun to study the identification methods of core technologies,and they have already obtained a certain theoretical basis.They identify the core technologies from multiple perspectives.First,they identify the technology based on experts’ knowledge and experience.For instance,Zhang Hui,et al[1]identified the core technology of oil and gas drilling by using the basic principles of Delphi method.Guo Junfang and others[2]mainly used qualitative methods such as situational analysis,SWOT analysis,analytic hierarchy process and Delphi method,and relied on expert experience to build technology roadmap for identifying core technologies.Liang Jun,et al.[3]proposed that the screening of important patents should be done by experts in the corresponding technical field.The second is based on patent citation network analysis.For example,Li Bei,et al[4]took the invention patents and patent citations authorized by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in mainland China from 2000 to 2012 as samples to identify the current core technologies and important emerging technology areas with the patent citation network analysis method.Yan Jie and others[5]constructed a Tesla patent citation analysis data set,and then identified the core and non-core technical areas of Tesla’s pure electric vehicles based on the principle of technology track identification.The third is to build an evaluation index system.For example,Wang Tiange,et al.[6]determined the weight of each index by constructing a comprehensive evaluation index system of core patents,combined with the TOPSIS method and the analytic hierarchy process,and identified 150 core patents for biomedicine in China.Yang Wu and others[7]screened the evaluation indicators of the core technologies of the industry and constructed the index system of core technology identification.Then,the optimal combination weighting method was used to determine the index weights,and the core technology evaluation index was constructed.Finally the patents were classified based on the sequence of calculation results to identify the core patents.

At present,most technology prediction methods at home and abroad mainly use text mining[8],big data,social network analysis,natural language processing,machine learning and others to obtain technologyrelated content from literature or patents information.Then,a fine-grained analysis is performed on the selected related text by constructing a model,which is mainly divided into internal literature modeling technology and inter-literature modeling technology[9].Finally,the technical prediction results are obtained through prediction analysis of the constructed model and combining with the prediction objectives.

In summary,the existing literature has contributed a lot to the identification of core technologies,but there are still many gaps.For example,the identification of core technologies is relatively weak,and the core technologies are not combined with market value.The core technologies sought for may be derailed from reality.This paper first identifies the core technologies in the vaccine field,and then the core technology is connected to the market to explore its market value.Finally,through indepth excavation of the core technologies,we can find out the technologies that are most likely to become the mainstream in the future.The research framework of this paper is shown in Fig.1.

2 Data acquisition and pre-processing

The patent data used in this paper come from the Incopat technology innovation intelligence platform.The Incopat patent database is the world’s first patent intelligence platform for China’s R&D and innovation personnel,which can provide comprehensive,timely and accurate patent information.In this paper,((TIAB=(vaccine,bacterial,or toxoid)) AND (IPC=(A61K39))) is used as the search strategy.The search results are subjected to secondary screening,and the screening conditions are set for patents from 2008 to 2017,excluding utility model patents and design patents.After manual weight removal and data cleaning,6 615 vaccine patents are finally obtained,all of their bibliographic entries are downloaded and the Excel database is constructed as well.

3 Empirical research in the field of vaccines

3.1 Stages of technology life cycle in the vaccine field

According to the patent application data collected in vaccine field from 2008 to 2017,from the macro level,the S curve of the technical life cycle of the vaccine field is drawn with time as the horizontal axis and cumulative patent application volume as the vertical axis,as shown in Fig.2.

As can be seen from Fig.2,as of 2016,the cumulative number of patent applications had been steadily climbing,which indicated that the field of vaccines was in the growth stage of the technology life cycle.Therefore,it is suitable for further research in this paper.

3.2 Identification of core technologies in the vaccine field

This paper intends to use social network analysis to identify core technologies in the vaccine field by combining three indicators of degree centrality,intermediary centrality,and feature vector centrality.

3.2.1 Construction of international patent classification (IPC) number co-occurrence matrix

Excel is used as the medium and the function formula:=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(FIND($C2,$A$2:$A$295)*FIND(F$1,$A$2:$A$295))) is applied to construct 2008-2017 IPC co-occurrence matrix in the vaccine field,as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 IPC co-occurrence matrix of some patents

Continued Table 1

3.2.2 Social network analysis and identification core technology

Based on the method of identifying core technologies by Wang Hailong,et al[10],this paper uses social network analysis to import the IPC cooccurrence matrix into UCINET software,and NetDraw visual analysis software is applied to visualize it.Thus the central indicators of various technologies in vaccine field are obtained,as shown in Table 2,and the visual network diagram of different technologies in the vaccine field is shown in Fig.3.

Table 2 Central indicators of hot technologies in the vaccine field

As can be seen from Table 2 and Fig.3,the core technology visual network diagram is combined with three indicators of degree centrality,intermediary centrality,and feature vector centrality to select four core technologies in the vaccine field,namely:A61P31/14 (technology for RNA viruses),A61K39/12(viral antigen),A61P31/04 (antibacterial),and A61K39/39 (characterized by immunostimulatory additives such as chemical adjuvant).These four core technologies focus on genes,viruses,and immunity and they are related to high-prevalence diseases such as cervical cancer,shingles,tuberculosis,rabies,polio,and pneumococcus,which currently affect a large number of people in China.In recent years,with the research and application of molecular biology and genetic engineering technology,new technologies have gradually been applied to vaccine production,recombinant virus-like particle technology,multiple and multivalent vaccine technology,polysaccharide protein conjugate vaccine technology,new vaccine adjuvant,etc.It is the hot spot of vaccine development in China.

3.3 Value assessment of core technology market

The core technologies identified through social network analysis are only carried out from the technical perspective.However,the market value is an essential factor for a comprehensive assessment of whether the identified technologies meet the needs of the market.Therefore,this paper uses RMF customer market value assessment model which is popular in the field of marketing to conduct further market value evaluation on the identified core technologies,and then to find out the core technologies with both technical value and market value.

RFM customer market value assessment model mainly includes three indicators ofR,F,andM,respectively representing recency,frequency,and monetary.This research adopts the RFM model index assessment system proposed by Chen Ruizhen,et al[11],regards each patent as a separate customer,and assigns three indexes ofR,F,andMto the meaning of patents.Among them,Ris the average values of forward citation years of core patents,and the larger theRvalue,the higher the current market value of the patent.TheFis the average forward reference values of the core patents.The larger theFvalue,the higher innovation of the patent.TheMvalue is the number of family patents of the core patents.The larger theMvalue,the better the market prospect of the patent.Considering that this paper mainly examines core technologies,each core technology involves multiple patents,the above evaluation system is adjusted,and each core technology takes the respective average values of the three indexes ofR,F,andMas the core values.Finally,theR,F,andMvalues of the technology are obtained,as shown in Table 3.

According to the assessment results of the core technologies in Table 3,taking the market recency,frequency,and monetary as the targets,the four core technologies identified are sorted under each index,as shown in Table 4.

Table 3 Core technology assessment results from 2008 to 2017

Table 4 Ranking of core technology assessment indicators

As can be seen from Table 4,the core technology that has both technical and market value in the vaccine field is A61P31,which contains patents representing technologies for RNA virus or antibacterial drugs.

3.4 Core technology forecast

In this paper,for the prediction of core technologies,the Condorcet voting method was used by Feng Chong,et al[12].The indicator system selected in the previous steps is applied to comprehensively compare the four identified core technologies and find out the mainstream technologies with long-term development prospects.

The Condorcet voting method is a sort of voting method commonly used in management.As one of the majority decision rules,the Condorcet voting method is suitable for comprehensive and systematic evaluation of multiple candidates.The specific steps of this method in the technology prediction of this paper are as follows.(1) Each technology to be evaluated is regarded as a candidate and the assessment indicator designed is used as a voter.(2) All technology clusters should be ranked under each assessment indicator.(3)The technology clusters should be compared one by one,and the number of wins,losses,and draws of the results can be obtained.(4) According to the above two-two comparison matrix,the Condorcet score of each technology cluster should be calculated,and all technology clusters can be ranked according to the score[13].Using the comprehensive ranking of the assessment results of each indicator in Table 4,the identified core technologies are compared in pairs to form a pair wise comparison matrix for Condorcet,as shown in Table 5.

The matrix counts the number of occurrences of wins,failures,and draws for each core technology and calculates the final score,as shown in Table 6.

Table 5 Condorcet comparison matrix

Table 6 Condorcet score statistics

From the score statistics in Table 6,it can be seen that the core technology A61P31/14 identified in this study has a score of 3 points in the win column,ranking first in the total.The core technologies A61K39/12,A61P31/04 and A61K39/39 have a score of 1 in the win column and a score of 2 in the failure column respectively.All four core technologies have a score of 0 in the draw column.And the final comprehensive ranking is A61P31/14 ＞ A61K39/12=A61P31/04=A61K39/39,that is,the core technology A61P31/14 has the best development prospects compared with other technologies in the future vaccine field.Therefore,vaccine enterprises and the government should focus on this one.

4 Conclusion and suggestions

As the global economy continues to accelerate,core technologies have been increasingly favored by countries around the world because they are the important factors driving economic growth.The purpose of this paper is to identify the core technologies in the vaccine field.Besides,the RFM customer market value assessment model and the Condorcet voting method are used to evaluate the market value of the identified core technologies and to predict the new core technologies respectively.Through the in-depth excavation of core technologies and development trends in the vaccine field,A61P31 is identified as the core technology with good market value and technical value.In further research,this study predicts that the promising technology in the field of vaccines is A61P31/14,and this IPC classification number represents technology for RNA viruses.

Through the above-mentioned research and analysis on the identification and prediction of core technologies in China’s vaccine field,some suggestions are put forward for China’s enterprises in formulating R&D strategies and activities.First of all,enterprises should attach great importance to patent application and protection,seize key R&D directions and carry out in-depth development for Chinese diseases as well as a comprehensive layout of peripheral patents around core patents.Secondly,enterprises should grab the opportunity of rapid development of China’s vaccine field and conduct R&D activities around core patents to avoid the technology deviating from the normal track.In addition,new and efficient vaccines are necessary for humans to prevent infectious diseases.China’s vaccine industry should pay full attention to the current key disease prevention and shift its R&D focus from disease treatment to disease prevention.Finally,the government should provide adequate support for patent protection and related laws.At the same time,a series of incentive policies should be introduced to encourage enterprises to carry out vaccine R&D activities,thereby promoting the high-quality cycle of the vaccine industry and ensuring the sound development of public health in China.