Functional technology foresight. A novel methodology to identify emerging technologies

The speed and complexity of the technology evolution faced by modern societies need new approaches to the analysis and understanding of the world. Indeed, an exclusive focus on technological goals can miss to recognize all the stakeholders of a technology and address real user needs; moreover, on the one hand low signals are becoming more and more important in fast evolving markets, on the other hand the excess of hype, fashions, or vested interests sometimes deeply alter indicators. However, the so called Big Data promise to be a huge low cost set of valuable information, available and affordable to all (SMEs included). But, analyzing them is not trivial especially if we deal with academic papers and patents. To tackle these issues, the present paper proposes to apply a powerful methodological tool called Functional Analysis to the Technology Foresight process. Actually the rigorous study of the functions, that an artefact should perform to satisfy the user needs, provides a universal and thus unifying point of view, which is able to correlate the user perspective on the product with its technical features. Functional reasoning has been applied to (i) detect possible patterns of development, spotting missing elements and highlighting strengths as well as potential sources of failure; (ii) to enhance traditional bibliometric tools such as the analysis of S-curves and (iii), integrated with a natural language processing analysis toolchain, tailored for patent documents, to identify emerging technologies. The paper describes the functional approach to technology foresight activity, presents how to integrate it with text mining algorithms and experts' domain knowledge, and finally discusses its benefits in the context of Technology Foresight also from an economic point of view, showing that oresight is affordable also for Small and Medium Enterprises.