Weak signal detecting of industry convergence using information of products and services of global listed companies - focusing on growth engine industry in South Korea

The [World Economic Forum 2016, https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economicforum- annual-meeting-2016. Accessed 5 Aug 2017] predicted that the world would face the Fourth Industrial Revolution which means innovative changes through convergence of cutting-edge information and communications technologies (ICTs) such as artificial intelligence, IoT, big data and cloud computing with conventional industries. It was forecasted that such innovation would take place across all industries and services. In particular, the Fourth Industrial Revolution has paid attention to changes in conventional traditional industries. The weak signal analysis is a method which can detect the sign of future changes at an early stage. A weak signal is defined as an advanced indicator in such changes. Therefore, its search and monitoring can be an early warning on threat and great opportunity to be prepared. To overcome the limitation of future prediction which is mostly dependent upon an expert group’s intuitive judgment, this study attempted to investigate the weak signal of convergence among industries, using knowledge structure based approaches. As new products and services can lead to convergence between industries, research data has gathered information on the products and services of global listed companies which have been established for the past 11 years. For comparative analysis, they were grouped every 5 years, and product and service trends were compared. And we detected weak signals of convergence with different industries and noticed the changes of existing industries. Historically, the convergence of industries is mainly discussed in relation to science and technology-led industries, so the industrial field that has been studied has chosen Korea’s growth engine industries, a high-tech science and technology industries.