Development of technology opportunity analysis based on technology landscape by extending technology elements with BERT and TRIZ

Technology opportunity analysis (TOA) has been the subject of many prior studies, most of which have focused on deconstructing and restructuring the original knowledge structure in a single domain. This study suggests a method by extending technology elements with BERT and TRIZ that endeavors to address these issues. First, patents collected from the Derwent database were used as data sources. Second, BERT was employed to construct a technology landscape as a vector space model where similar technology elements are classified into the same technology topic. Meanwhile, TEMPEST was employed to cluster technology topics and elements according to different functions and other dimensions. Third, technology elements were extended by function-oriented search (FOS), which is a useful method of TRIZ. It includes extracting new technology elements from newly retrieved patents about implementing a specific function in other domains. Fourth, technology opportunities were identified by recombining original and new technology elements and then verifying their feasibility. Finally, the proposed approach was employed in empirical analysis for unmanned ships and 10 technology opportunities generated through knowledge migration. The process designed in this study combines quantitative modeling and qualitative analysis, which realizes accurate search and efficient innovation among different domains.