The Technology Roots Spectrum: A New Visualization Tool for Identifying the Roots of a Technology

Introduction The purpose of this work is to present a new tool for identifying the technological foundations, or roots, of a specific technology in the whole range of existing technologies. The idea is to go back to the date before a specific technology existed as such― its origin date―and to evaluate the influence of every existing technology in relation with it. Our tool is based on the role played by prior art patent citations as a historical footprint. The documents cited in the prior art search reports by patent examiners against patent applications in a particular ―new―technology link the new emerging techniques to the conventional existing ones. The nature of this particular set of references, namely who produced the citations―the patent examiner in place of the author―and why they are cited―the evaluation of the novelty and non-obviousness―, is unique within the body of bibliographic references (Meyer, 2000), and explicitly points to temporal and conceptual proximity. These two factors seem fundamental to the study of history and technology. The Technology Roots spectrum (TR spectrum) is a tool for visualizing the components at the origin of the specific technology under study, showing their relative weight as bars in a graph containing the whole range―the spectrum―of technologies. It uses the computer to exploit the network formed by prior-art citations in patent publications and the classification codes assigned to them. This tool can be used to study the history of technology and, as a technology indicator of technological origins, can also be used for defining technology metrics.