Characterization of strategic emerging technologies: the case of big data

Current enterprises face organizational and cultural barriers to adopt and harness the potential of strategic emerging technologies. Late adoption of these technologies will affect competitiveness from which it will be hard to recover. Within the frame of technology analysis field, the present work aims at introducing an approach to obtain the characterization of emerging technologies, which facilitates understanding and identifies their potential. This characterization is based on the analysis of scientific activity, to which a set of quantitative methods is applied, namely bibliometrics, text mining, principal component analysis and time series analysis. The outcome is based on obtaining a set of dominant sub-technologies, which are described by means of individual time series, which also allow evolution of the technology as a whole to be forecasted. The approach is applied to the Big Data technology field and the results suggest that sub-technologies such as Mobile Telecommunications and Internet of things will lead this field in the near future.