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Theories and Methods of Science of Science

A Review and Prospect of Product Pre-research 

Sun Xiaoming1 , Wang Chenhui2 , Li Zexian1 , Su Qian1 , Hao Jiaqi3 

(1.School of Management, Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology, Xi'an 710055, China; 2.School of Business, Xi 'an International University, Xi'an 710077, China; 3.College of Civil Engineering, Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, Baotou 014010, China)

Abstract: Product innovation is one of the important driving forces to improve enterprises' performance, and the pre-research, as the stage of creative generation, concept generation and project evaluation of product innovation, has an important impact on the success of product inno‐ vation. With the continuous changes in the world economic pattern and the product research and development environment, pre-research has become the R&D activities for enterprises to im‐ prove their core competitiveness. Therefore, the pre-research has also become the focus of many scholars' research. However, there have been researches on the definition, characteristics, per‐ formance of pre-research and the impact of pre-research activities on new product development, while few researches have involved the knowledge base of pre-research, the dynamic change trend of research hotspots, research frontiers, and the future research direction of pre-research under the background of new era. In view of this, this paper uses CiteSpace visualization soft‐ ware to analyze domestic and foreign pre-research literature data, draw the knowledge map of the research country, research institutions, research author, keyword co-occurrence map, cluster map, mutation word intensity map and keyword time-line distribution map in the field of preresearch knowledge, and study the status quo, research hotspots and research frontiers of preresearch research. Finally, in view of the shortcomings of existing literature, this paper summa‐ rizes the future research direction under the background of the new era, hoping to provide cer‐ tain references and references for the corresponding research in the future. 

Key words: product pre-research; product innovation; visual analysis; cooperative network