A systematic approach to identify core service technologies

In spite of the importance of service technologies in the service industry, they have not been analysed systematically. In response, this study proposes a new approach to identify core service technologies. At first, the technological interrelationship matrices from the perspectives of intensity, relatedness, and cross-impact are constructed with support, lift, and confidence values calculated by conducting an association rule mining on the co-classification information of business method patent data. The analytic network process is applied to the constructed technological interrelationship matrices in order to produce the importance values of service technologies from each perspective, considering their direct and indirect interrelationships. Data envelopment analysis is then employed to the derived importance values in order to identify core service technologies, putting three perspectives together. The proposed approach can be utilised for both firms’ planning of service technologies and service innovation policy-making of governments.