Track: Technology Management

Abstract

Patents are documents about inventions that provide legal protection from which we can learn about technological development. Firms hold the monopoly of producing the relevant technology for a certain period of time, and in order to protect their technological superiority, they prepare the invention notification forms and complete their official applications to the patent office. The number of patents is a strong indicator of the R&D activities of a firm, country or region. For this reason, it is possible to write a large number of scientific articles that specifically analyze a technology or a region. Thus, what does society think of these official monopoly documents? One of the ways to find out what the society thinks about a subject is to follow the flow on the social media channel twitter. This study presents a partial analysis of what the public is talking about on twitter about patents. The tweets written in English, collected for a total of 2 months (106415 tweets), are subjected to a content analysis. When the hashtags of the tweets were examined, it was determined that the patents of some technologies (VR, crypto, blockchain, vaccine) were much trendy. In addition, sentiment analysis of tweet contents was also performed. It has been determined that while the emotional state is neutral in tweets about crypto patents, the average emotional intensity of tweets about vaccines is negative. In addition, it has been revealed through analyzes that these results differ according to countries and gender.

Keywords:
Sentiment analysis, patents, tweets, technologies, vaccines