A function oriented method for competitive technological intelligence and technology forecasting

Many forms of analyzing future technology and its consequences coexist. Some examples are technology intelligence, forecasting, road mapping, and foresight. All of these techniques fit into a field that we call Technology Futures Analysis (TFA). Unfortunately, both competitive and forecasting analyses are not well utilized in company decision-making, especially those based on analytical patent analysis. Three factors could enhance managerial utilization: capability to exploit huge volumes of available information, ways to do it very quickly, and informative representations that help to discover emerging technologies. This paper reports an effort to address these three goals via a brand new method of analysis conceived to quickly and graphically generate helpful knowledge from patents. The first novelty is to adopt a function-oriented process to identify the most important features of a product or technology. Then, we exemplify a method to manage patent search that integrates functional basis with physical and chemical effects library. The outcome is a concise and graphical state of art, which helps to define players and patterns in the development of a target technology. This takes the form of a infographic map, and is finally used to discover emerging technologies, white space opportunities or new market potentials. All the Text mining process is supported by Kompat, a semantic search engine explicitly conceived for forecasting patent search.