Study of technology communities and dominant technology lock-in in the Internet of Things domain - Based on social network analysis of patent network

The evolution of technology communities and the lock-in process of dominant technologies influence the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) in achieving its goal of connecting everything. This study aims to identify and analyze IoT technology communities and main technology trajectories, and to trace and explore the lock-in and unlocking process of IoT dominant technologies. A directed citation network was constructed using 9,464 IoT patent families as nodes and 23,604 inter-patent citation relationships as directed links. We used the Louvain algorithm and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling technique to divide the communities and extract their themes, and the SPLC algorithm and key-route global main path search method to identify the dominant technology trajectories. The results show that first, technologies that emerged during the embryonic stage of IoT exhibit a declining trend as the standardization process of IoT progresses; technologies introduced during IoT's growing stage continue to increase, benefiting from the positive cyclical effect of application and integrated innovation. Second, major developments in IoT involve device risk assessment, machine learning, and machine-to-machine technologies. Third, the lock-in of IoT dominant technologies is accompanied by a 'learning by using' effect and an incremental succession of innovations. The novelty of this study lies in the combination of both community analysis and main path analysis methods, which help researchers and participators grasp the IoT technology development holistically from both horizontal - technology categorization and vertical - time perspectives. Meanwhile, we also analyzed the lock-in and unlocking process of IoT dominant technologies to provide a reference for participators to develop technological strategies.