The new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics have changed the current industrial structure and recreated the new industries that are majorly based on the value chain of the global network environmen...
The new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics have changed the current industrial structure and recreated the new industries that are majorly based on the value chain of the global network environment. In a recent setting, the emergence of technological development and innovation is much dependent on a collaborative structure that can facilitate the recombination of existing knowledge and technologies to generate innovation. To enhance the collaborative structure and technological recombination, it is important to establish an environment that is less bounded and blurry and supports an open ecosystem environment. The innovation and knowledge ecosystem is characterized by a community of actors that assist evolving characters of knowledge structure and performance to co-produce innovation. The changing dynamics of interactions in an ecosystem provide a better understanding of the development and competitive strategy of emerging technology leading to value creation. Hence, this study utilizes the perspective of an ecosystem to analyze the development trends of scientific and technological knowledge and knowledge flow structure of a specific emerging technology. For this, the study uses the case of educational robotics technology and developed a framework to examine the comprehensive knowledge structure, evolutionary trends, and collaborative patterns in this technological area.
In the first part of the study, the ecosystem framework is evaluated and the theory of the knowledge ecosystem is updated in the context of this study. The theoretical study evaluates the knowledge production pattern and type of knowledge produced within the structure. In the second part, the importance of educational robots has been highlighted to understand its role and future potentials. A special focus is given to highlight the role of educational robots in the current scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the paper analyzed the scientific knowledge structure by applying the bibliometric and scientometric based evaluation methods to examine the productivity and performance of major countries and players in educational robotics domain. Also, the different principles of social network analysis like hubs, authorities, and broker analysis are used to identify the key countries and institutions working in the educational robotics area. The co-citation analysis at the country and institutional level is done to quantify and evaluate the connections among these players. Finally, an interaction among the players has been visualized by using a network map. The findings of the analysis showed that educational robotics research is more prominent in developed countries like the US, UK, Japan, and East Asian, and countries of other developing regions still lack scientific research in this area. USA, UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands are the most significant hubs and authorities acting as an important point in knowledge transfer. Netherland, Japan, and the USA play an important role as gatekeeper functionalities by acting as important bridge agents in knowledge transfer activities. Similarly, the most important institutions found were also mostly from advanced nations like Australia, the US, Sweden, and Canada. The competitive analysis is helpful to evaluate the country’s position and performance and the result can support R&D investment and policy-related decisions.
In the next part of the study, the paper identified the important concepts and representative research areas from the scientific knowledge data by using keyword co-occurrence analysis. Further, representative research areas are selected by using centrality based measures that were used to find important and influential keywords. Also, topic modeling based on latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms is applied to technological knowledge (patents) data to identify the latent knowledge structure and valuable topics. The model offers emerging technology areas and trends and contribute to the understanding of the emergence and development of technology over time and in forecasting the technology for the near future. At the final step of the analysis, the views and expectations of users on educational robotics technology have been analyzed by using the hype curve, and sentiment analysis. The analysis is conducted on twitter data to provide a better understanding of the response and sentiments of users. Social media, as a source of knowledge exchange, has an impact on the innovation ecosystem and support open innovation models. Understanding the polarity and sentiments by using social media helpful in analyzing the market expectation on technology. This result of the analysis can be useful to understand the educational technology adoption process in the market and can assist in other market-related decisions.