Disruptive development path measurement for emerging technologies based on the patent citation network

Studying disruptive innovation development paths for emerging technologies helps trace and grasp key core technologies development, promoting innovation and development in emerging technologies and industries. This paper measures the innovation development path for emerging technology, including: (1) improving the triple citation network and quantifying disruptive measurement by designing a technological disruption model; (2) proposing a contraction method for the citation network from the dataset perspective; (3) proposing a method to extract the main path using technology disruption degree as a criterion for citation networks importance; (4) taking the sintering technology in 3-D printing technology as the empirical object with 12,662 patent families from 1997 to 2019. The empirical results indicate that the disruption degree value is determined by the transitive citation relationship without the co-citation relationship, and the closed-loop structures are effectively removed, thereby reducing the size of the dataset. The proposed disruption quantification method can support effective evaluation of technological innovation levels and decision-making for the research and development (R&D) direction and resource allocation.