A Patent Analysis for the Strategic Landscape of Firms: Cancer Metabolism

Patent information as a proxy measure of technological capability has been utilized to establish technological strategies of firms. It is important to monitor what competitors’ plans for direction on research and development in the initial stage of new industry. Cancer metabolism has been considered as a beacon of hope for cancer research because it is anticipated that the research field will play a central role in developing effective cancer therapies. There is little attention given to understanding the status quo of organizational configurations. By utilizing network analysis, six sub-groups of cancer metabolism were categorized and the relationship between an individual field and participants were analyzed based on cluster and entire network-level. Although the largest drug and biotech companies tried to take an initiative across the whole fields, the differences in technological capabilities between them was discovered. This paper attempts to improve the validity of the suggested procedure and is significant in that it looks at the entire structure of cancer metabolism research from a strategic perspective for the first time.