突破性技术发明的涌现轨迹——以心脏起博器行业为例

Emerging Path of Radical Inventions——Evidences from Pacemaker Industry

突破性技术发明在技术生命周期早期阶段密集涌现的理论推定,缺乏实证支持。本文以稳定处于技术生命周期成熟期的心脏起搏器行业为研究对象,选择专利被引次数作为界定突破性技术的标准,采用Log istic和Q uadratic模型,分别拟合技术生命周期轨迹和突破性技术涌现轨迹。研究发现,在整个生命周期内突破性技术涌现呈现稳健的倒U形分布,生命周期最前端的专利技术并没有获得最多的引用。进一步从知识积累角度对突破性技术倒U形涌现轨迹给以初步解释。

The theoretical hypothesis that radical invention will emerge at the first stage of technology life cycle need empirical support.This paper focuses on the field of radical inventions such as peacemaker industry,which is seletcted as a sample because it has been at a mature level of life cycle for a long time.The citation frequency of patents is regarded as the criteria of radical inventions.Then logistics and quadratic curve regression are applied.The empirical result shows that radical inventions emerged as an inverse U-shape path steadily,and patents which were granted at the first stage of technology life had not got the most citation frequencies.From the point of view of knowledge accumulation,this paper tries to give some explanations to these new findings.