Service Technology: Definition and Characteristics Based on a Patent Database

With the rise of service innovation, service is no longer considered peripheral to the business environment, and is increasingly being seen as a core offering to customers. Technology has played a central role in the rise of service innovation, but previous studies on service technology have discussed mostly qualitative approaches. For this reason, the concept of “a service technology” has not been properly defined based on the large amount of empirical evidence. To address this limitation, we define and characterize service technologies using patents to come up with a consensus and adopt a five-step process that embraces three viewpoints on the notion of service technology: the industry, patent, and technology perspectives. First, service industries are defined based on their International Standard Industrial Classification system categories, as prepared by the United Nations Statistics Division. Second, relevant service patents are extracted from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database for each service industry. Third, the International Patent Classification classes are obtained from these collected patents to investigate the technologies employed in service industries. Fourth, service technologies are defined and classified into six categories based on this patent classification analysis. Finally, the technological concentration and generality characteristics of each technology are analyzed.