Anticipation of converging technology areas - A refined approach for the identification of attractive fields of innovation

•The study proposes a refined approach to measure technology convergence.•The approach provides concrete numerical information for the measurement of technology convergence.•The approach allows for distinguishing between technology convergence and technology fusion.

A series of product innovations owe their economic success and origin to the impetus and know-how from disciplines and industries that were hitherto unfamiliar to the actors in the industries concerned. This phenomenon, known as “convergence”, leads to emerging industry segments and offers a wide array of opportunities for synergies. Against this background, a significant emphasis has been put on anticipating technology convergence as well as identifying and understanding the changing innovation patterns and industry structure associated with convergence. The timely recognition of converging technological fields enables the innovating enterprises to exert a positive influence on the changing value-chain.This paper introduces a refined methodological approach for the anticipation of converging technology areas based on the concept of knowledge flow. The proposed method is illustrated using patents related to the areas of Nutraceuticals and Functional Food (NFF), Nanotechnology and Wearables.Our results indicate that the emerging technology convergence can be expressed by the concept of “weak signals”. The indices derived from the proposed approach are capable of uncovering the relationships between the individual technological sectors and provide numerical metrics to measure the presence of converging technologies.