因應全球化趨勢與知識經濟潮流，知識與產業結合程度逐漸增高，科技產業尤為知識經濟的代表。知識經濟改變了競爭環境，企業必須快速地取得、吸收、管理、運用與創造知識，並成功的呈現創新於產品或服務上，才能確保企業的生存與保有競爭力。專利屬於企業研發投入中較易被量化的一種知識產出，利用專利分析除了可以評估公司無形資產的價值外，也能評估企業的技術實力以及公司價值。因此藉由同時瞭解專利的「質」與「量」有助於分析者瞭解競爭者技術的開發及人才動向，並瞭解新技術的機能、用途和潛在市場之可能性。 近年來許多專利分析大都偏向專利指標的衡量，有別於以往的研究，本研究嘗試利用社會網絡的觀點去探討專利的表現以及企業專利佈局。以網絡觀點看專利佈局除了能瞭解專利所處的地位及其影響力外，還能與先前的專利規劃做比對，提供檢討的方向。因此本研究利用小世界網絡模型與社會網絡的概念，針對TFT-LCD產業專利引用網絡進行分析。 根據本研究結果顯示，專利引用網絡為小世界網絡，其小世界網絡特性十分顯著。另外本研究從專利被引用、專利引用他人專利、專利總連結數三方觀察，發現不論何種型態的連結次數分布均呈現冪次分配的型態；若從專利引用次數的成長趨勢來看，我們也可以看出專利被引用具有偏好，也就是說某些專利對於產業技術而言是發展的主流。最後我們針對專利中介性做測試，發現63.75%的專利引用行為都與中介性高的專利有關，當我們去掉這些專利之後會有50.6%的專利知識得不到交流。 Survival in highly competitive markets requires producers to focus on important factors such as technology ability, product quality, adherence to standards and rapid response as the basis for competitive advantage. In an effort to meet these new demands, firms are deploying a range of innovations including advanced equipment and reconfiguration of business model. Innovation and product intelligence are keys to a successful TFT-LCD industry. To measure technological innovation and the relevant competitiveness, considerable progress has been made by adopting various indicators. In the area of proxy measurement of technological activity, patent analysis is commonly adopted. The main advantage of patent analysis is that records exist over long periods of time in most countries. Academics and policy makers have made increasing use of such indicators to measure technological accumulation and the direction of technical change. Up to date, the patent index has been widely used as an indicator by various researchers for patent analysis. Unlike previous studies, this study attempted to use the opinion of social network and small world network to analyze the TFT-LCD patent citation network. This can not only help reveal the position and influence of the patent but also provide us review the patent deployment. The analysis results in this study suggest that patent citation network can indeed be characterized as small world networks. One can also analyze the patent cited by, patent citing and total citation number. It was found that the distribution of citation count followed the power law and the patent citation had preferential attachment, i.e. some patents were the mainstream of industry development. Finally, we tested the betweenness centrality of patent citation network. There were 63.75% patent citation activities that were related to the patents with high betweenness centrality. In addition, the remove of patents with high betweenness centrality from the citation network would lead to 50.6% of lose-communication patent knowledge.
