Keywords: technology innovation, patent analysis, strategy planning, construction, precast construction technology.

Technology innovation has been conceived as the major factor for construction cost effectiveness and constructability improvement. However, previous research on technology management rarely emphasised patent analysis. Due to the economy globalization, construction firms have to face competition from all over the world. As a results, technology innovation plays an important role for enhancing a firm's global competitiveness.

In this paper, a strategy planning method, namely technology positioning and strategy analysis model (TPSAM), for a specific technology domain is proposed. The TPSAM method integrates both macro and micro patent analysis techniques and a fuzzy rule base system to form a systematic approach for technology strategy planning. Patent analysis techniques including patent portfolio, multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), revealed patent advantage (RPA), relative citation index (RCI), and patent activity (PA) are adopted to find out the attribute values of a specific domain technology. The fuzzy rule base is automatically constructed using the Kohonen learning algorithm based on the patent information collected from a public patent database. The most appropriate technology strategies are inferred by the fuzzy rule based system based on input attribute values from the patent analyses. For illustration purposes, a case study considering the precast concrete technology (PCT) as the target technology and selecting the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as the patent database to test the proposed TPSAM method is presented. The test results show that the proposed TPSAM method provides a promising platform for technology development and innovation strategy planning.

The paper will be structured as follows: strategy analysis for construction technology innovation and development in general is introduced first; secondly, the patent analysis literature is reviewed to provide a background for readers from the construction domain; the proposed TPSAM method is described in detail in the third section; a case study that applies the TPSAM for analysis of technology strategies of the precast concrete technology based on patent information of the USPTO is demonstrated; finally, conclusions and recommendations are discussed.

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