Research on Technology Convergence Mechanism Based on Multi-Layers Network: A Case Study of Industrial Robots

Technology convergence is meaningful for emerging technology development and transitional industry transformation, and there are more and more researches focusing on its development pathway and effects. However, there are still few researches concerning why the technology convergence appears and changes. This research proposes to unfold its evolution mechanism from the perspective of network evolution. Besides the network structure features, this research tries to embed the nature features of nodes to analyze the mechanism based on multiple exponential random graph models, such as technology features, enterprises features, etc. It utilizes patentee cooperation network and IPC co-occurrence network to characterize the enterprise cooperation and technology convergence based on patent data, and conduct empirical study on industrial robots to test the mechanism. The results indicate that the network structure features of two networks and the nature features of nodes which contain technology features and enterprise features all have a significant impact on the mechanism of technology convergence, and the impact on converging mechanism changes over time. The findings of this research bear concrete implications for capturing technology convergence mechanism and the direction of technology development within the technical field.