Technology Competitiveness and Performance
According to an analysis by the Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center (STPI) of National Applied Research Laboratories (NARLabs), the number of granted Taiwanese patents in the United States Patent and Trademark Office is increasing annually. The five leading assignee countries are the United States, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Taiwan. Cumulatively, Taiwan-received US patents accounted for 3.62% of all countries in 2009–2013 (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Top 5 Origins and Share of Countries in Total Patent Grants
Taiwan has numerous patents, but few of them are considered high-impact patents. A patent is considered high-impact when the number of its citations is among the top 10% of the total number of citations. Taiwan is ranked 12th for the proportion of high-impact patents in the world, but this proportion has gradually increased in recent years. Taiwan's Technology Influence Index (TII) has increased from 0.51 to 0.60 (Figure 2), indicating that the quality of patents has increased each year.
(TII = The proportion of high-impact patents among the total number of patents for a country divided by the proportion of high-impact patents among the total number of patents worldwide)
Figure 2. TII Trend Analysis
Figure 3 shows the impact of Taiwan's patents in various technology fields. Concentration technology advantages (horizontal axis) refer to Taiwan's patent focus in this field as the proportion of patents relative to the global level; if the ratio is higher than 1, it means that Taiwan's patents in this field are focused proportionally higher than the global level. Figure 3 shows that Taiwan's patents are more concentrated in the fields of electrical machinery, apparatus energy, semiconductors, audiovisual technology, optics, and basic communication processes.
Figure 3. Relative Impact of Taiwan's Patents in Various Technology Fields
The vertical axis represents the relative impact index (patent citations relative to the world average); a value higher than 0.8 can be regarded as having a high impact in general. The results indicate that the fields that have the highest level of investment and impact are electrical machinery, apparatus, energy, semiconductors and machine tools, and although the number of machine tool patents is not particularly high, these patents have had a relatively higher impact compared with other patent types.
STPI adopts text mining to explore technology fields related to Industry 4.0. Their results have shown that data processing and information devices are the most crucial technologies for Industry 4.0, and according to the number of patents in these two fields, Taiwan is ranked sixth in the world, following the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, and Canada, and the number of patents has been increasing annually (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Country Patent Performance in Industry 4.0 Related Technologies
Taiwan's Competitiveness in Academia
An analysis of academic capability, which was conducted using the Thomson Reuters databa
Figure 5. Trend of the Average Number of Papers Cited
The horizontal axis in Figure 6 represents the ranking percentage for the journal impact factor. In general, the lower the ranking percentage is, the higher the journal quality is. Comparing the distribution of papers published in 2000-2004 and 2010–2014 reveals that the number of papers published in high-quality journals increased significantly during 2010–2014.
Figure 6. Quality of Journals That Have Published Taiwanese Papers
Further analysis of the performance of Taiwan's academic fields shows that both the quality and quantity of Taiwan's published papers in computer science, engineering, materials science, and physics are excellent, showing significant advantages in both field concentration and relative influence. Overall, Taiwan's academic competitiveness is highest in these fields. Moreover, the relative influence of agricultural science is above the world average, reaching 40%, which renders it an academic field with less quantity but higher quality. Regarding chemistry, mathematics and earth science, these fields of basic science have displayed stable development. From the aspect of growth trends, the field concentration for economics and business management, social sciences, and psychiatry and psychology has shown rapid growth in the last 10 years. Because they demonstrate a higher growth rate in relative influence, pharmacology and toxicology as well as biology and biochemistry are potential fields with considerable expectation.
Figure 7. Competitiveness Performance of Taiwan's Academic Fields
Recently, the Industry 4.0 concept has triggered a global intelligent manufacturing trend; moreover, Taiwan is a high performer in Industry 4.0-related fields. In particular, artificial intelligence, electronics engineering, operations research and management science, and telecommunications fields are high in both quantity and quality, making them a niche that Taiwan can position itself on to develop Industry 4.0 in the future.
One of the tasks of STPI is to enhance the value-added content and analysis of the data to further incorporate into science and technology policy research. To support policy planning and academic research, the performance of Taiwan's patent and academic capability has been analyzed and evaluated to enhance Taiwan's active developments in technological innovation and value creation, and to boost the country's international competitiveness. In the future, the rich experience of 40 years in value-added information and knowledge on science and technology policy will continue to be employed to contribute to developing scientific and technological research methods and knowledge databa
