A study on technology convergence trends in the domestic pet industry using patent information: Using network analysis and text mining

Due to the increasing trend of treating pets as family members, the pet-related industry has experienced significant growth and is being recognized as a key future industry. However, research using patent big data on the domestic pet industry remains limited. This study conducted three analyses to explore trends and technological convergence in the pet industry. First, patent data was collected using search queries from Wipson, and the convergence of pet-related technologies was analyzed using the IPC (International Patent Classification) codes. Second, the periods from 2015 to 2019 and from 2020 to 2024 were compared, using 2020 as a reference point when pet adoption rates increased significantly. Convergence patterns were analyzed based on the centrality of the patent classification codes. Third, the content of patents from each period was examined to identify key topics in pet technology. The analysis revealed that before 2020, 70% of patents began with the classification code B23B, a proportion that dropped to 40% after 2020. While patents related to materials and pet products dominated before 2020, functional pet food patents emerged as significant after 2020. Finally, topic modeling was conducted on the invention titles, using LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) and perplexity metrics. ChatGPT4o was employed to generate and refine topic names, and topics with high similarity were merged, resulting in a final list of topics.