A Cross-Database Comparison to Discover Potential Product Opportunities Using Text Mining and Cosine Similarity

Abstract

With the rise of the Internet in recent decades, commentary, news, and further information on new products are present on various web sites. Thus, the Internet has become an abundant source of market intelligence. In addition, technological applications are presented in patent databases and disseminated to popular media, based on the perspective of technology life cycle. Therefore, the interaction between technological applications coded by patents and market intelligence reported by the Internet assists in discovering potential product opportunities. This study intends to identify the areas where technological applications exist, excluding Internet reports, by exploring the corresponding relationships between patents and media reports. Such areas could be identified as potential product opportunities. Text-mining and the arbitrarily oriented projected cluster generation (ORCLUS) algorithm is employed to classify important fields of patents and media reports. The cosine similarity of tfidf is then used to detect the relationship between patents and media reports. The remote health monitoring technology is applied as a case in this study. The results show four product opportunities, namely: wireless sensor devices, telecommunication systems and technology, wearable devices and systems, and medical services and systems.