Tech mining for innovation management

The First Global Tech Mining (GTM) Conference met in September 2011, in conjunction with the Atlanta Conference on Science & Innovation Policy. As we write this overview, the VP Institute (www.VPInstitute.org) will be sponsoring the Third GTM (http://www.gtmconference.org) September 2013. The goal of the conference is to help build cross-disciplinary networks of analysts, software specialists and researchers to advance the use of textual information in multiple science, technology and business development fields (i.e. ‘tech mining’). This special issue presents six papers from the initial GTM conference that explore the development and application of bibliometrics, text analytics and visualisation to gain usable intelligence from topical database searches. For a quick sense of what is involved in these tech-mining analyses and toward what purposes, we perused the keywords of the six papers. Consolidating related ideas, we note: