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Patent portfolio analysis can be a useful approach to understand the characteristics of an industry and competitors in terms of their standard-setting activities. Despite its potential, however, little attention has been given to portfolio analysis, especially for essential patents. Therefore, this study aims to develop five patent portfolio maps that can be used to analyze essential patent strategies from various perspectives: 1) concentration, 2) activities, 3) diversity, 4) quality-breakthrough, and 5) quality-impact. Then, a case study is conducted on LTE-A technologies in the telecommunications sector, where technology standards are essential to establish technology strategies.

In recent years, the volume of mobile traffic has increased at an unprecedented rate and the mobile paradigm has changed. These dynamics have driven the next-generation telecommunications technologies, and the existing fourth-generation technology is reaching maturity. The pre-acquisition of promising future technologies enables firms to achieve and sustain their business growth; thus, numerous organizations in the telecommunications sector have made a huge amount of effort to develop fifth-generation (5G) technologies. Although understanding these emerging and promising 5G technologies is essential, they still remain poorly investigated. To fill this research gap, we first define the characteristics of promising technologies in the telecommunications sector, then develop a framework for identifying them based on patents. Specifically, we design three patent indices for deriving the core patents published by leading organizations in the sector. We then apply bibliographic coupling and text mining to the patents and identify their major innovation trends. We identify 21 technology fields as promising areas emphasized by the leading organizations. Theoretically, this study is one of the few attempts to examine various approaches to identify promising technologies and to suggest the most appropriate one considering the research purpose as well as the characteristics of telecommunications sector. In practice, this study can provide information about patent activities of key incumbent actors and thus offer some insights into recent technological developments towards 5G. We developed a framework for identifying promising telecommunications technologies.Patents recently published by leading organizations in the sector were collected.The RFM concept, bibliometric coupling and text mining were used for patent analysis.Four major R&D trends and 21 core technologies were found towards 5G.The findings show key patenting trends of incumbent organizations in the sector.

In an environment where customers can hardly describe new technology-based services (TBSs) of the future and technological engineers are unlikely to understand how a new technology can work for new services, a guideline to generate ideas for TBS can be utilized to achieve successful service innovation. Thus, this paper aims to develop an ideation framework for TBS. Two methods – the technology tree and the function analysis systems technique – are employed to identify core utilities expected from a new technology. Then a new method, the service encounter value matrix, which is based on morphology analysis and is used for generating potential service ideas, is suggested. Finally, these ideas are evaluated, and only those that are of a high priority according to customers’ expectations of future society are selected. In this study, the framework is applied to telecommunication technology, which is timely and useful for designing future services.

Given the increasing significance of technology-push strategy and market-driven strategy, an integrated approach to technology roadmapping that considers both strategies in a systemic way is needed. To satisfy such need, this study suggests a novel roadmapping approach, named opportunity-driven roadmapping. It integrates the identification of technological opportunities in a retrospective manner and the proposition of future values in a prospective manner. During roadmapping, three canvases (value proposition canvas, technology solution canvas, and roadmap canvas) are used and three analyses (scenario analysis, patent analysis, and relationship analysis) are employed to support decision-makings for each canvas. Since mobile services industry has numerous business opportunities due to the emergence of 5 G telecommunications technologies, the suggested approach is applied to mobile services industry to verify its usability.