기업의 기술 융복합 활동이 특허의 피인용에 미치는 영향: 미국 반도체 특허를 중심으로

To achieve continuous growth while responding to a rapidly changing competitive environment, companies should secure innovation competiencies that can enhance its technological competitiveness. Companies’ technology convergence activities not only contribute to raising the level of technological competitiveness, but also have a positive impact on maintaining the technical excellence of the patents. However, efforts to analyze the level of technological convergence and to understand the relationship with patent citations, which indicate the level of qualitative value of patents, have been insufficient. In this study, we apply the concept of eco-diversity to the technology convergence level of companies, and subdivide the IPC information contained in the bibliographic information of patents into IPC Divercity, IPC Balance, and IPC Disparity. We looked at how these indicators affect the number of patent citations. We analyzed 75,530 patents filed in the United States by the top 10 global semiconductor companies from 2011 to 2020, and verified that the technological convergence activities of companies have a positive relationship on the number of patent citations.