Informing Innovation Management: Linking Leading R&D Firms and Emerging Technologies

Understanding the relationship between emerging technology and research and development has long been of interest to companies, policy makers and researchers. In this paper new sources of data and tools are combined with a novel technique to construct a model linking a defined set of emerging technologies with the global leading R&D spending companies. The result is a new map of this landscape. This map reveals the proximity of technologies and companies in the knowledge embedded in their corresponding Wikipedia profiles, enabling analysis of the closest associations between the companies and emerging technologies. A significant positive correlation for a related set of patent data validates the approach. Finally, a set of Circular Economy Emerging Technologies are matched to their closest leading R&D spending company, prompting future research ideas in broader or narrower application of the model to specific technology themes, company competitor landscapes and national interest concerns.