Combining patent mapping and hyperlink prediction to discover technology opportunities

Exploring and analyzing technology opportunities in specific fields can provide new references and suggestions for enterprises to achieve original innovation from scratch. This paper proposes a new method for discovering technology opportunities by combining patent mapping and hyperlink prediction. First, the patent vector is constructed based on TF-IDF and the IPC priority information from patents. Then, a patent map is constructed to detect technology vacuums, and inverse mapping is employed to obtain the details of technology opportunities corresponding to these vacuums. Next, a technology co-occurrence hypernetwork is constructed, and promising technology opportunities are discovered through hyperlink prediction. Finally, a metric for identifying valuable technology opportunities is constructed by combining metrics of novelty, centrality, and cross-disciplinarity using the entropy weight method. Taking the field of intelligent question-answering technology as an example, the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper has been verified. It successfully discovered high-value 3-ary and 4-ary technology opportunities, providing decision support for the technology strategic layout and innovation strategies of enterprises.