ACARE and Flight Path 2050 Goals for Maintaining and Extending Aviation Industrial Leadership

For achieving ACARE goals, one of the purposes of European Union funded-project PARE project research is to evaluate the European potential for future long-term technological leadership. This assessment is performed through the characterisation of a map of the European Aviation Technology Space, and provides hindsight into two complementary issues:

i) The analysis of the capacity of the European industry to master key technological areas and to innovate on them.

ii) The assessment of the European aerospace collaboration structures to co-operate effectively and sum up knowledge and effort into the innovation path.

Two different approaches and methods are used in this paper to analyse the structure of the technological innovation networks in European aviation and to characterise the map of the European Aviation Technology Space. On one side, we perform a bibliometric network analysis of aviation research scientific publications, based on a keywords co-occurrence analysis method, to map the European aerospace collaboration structures. This first study relays on the analysis of scientific and technical publications.

downloaded from the Web of Science Database by using the “WC= (“Aerospace, Engineering”)” query with last ten years limitation.

A total of 57.982 publications have been analysed. All visuals in this study have been prepared using VOSviewer software.

Complementarily, we perform patent analysis to evaluate the innovation capacity of the European industry in the cutting edge technologies previously identified. Derwent Innovations Index has been used as a data source for patent analysis, and 23,508 patents related to aviation have been analysed. The patent analysis has been performed with Vantage Point software.