How to discover new business opportunities and how to decide which ones are worth pursuing has become today an increasingly common and crucial question for the survival of many start-ups and companies that now have an established technology in a saturated market. The academic world has long sought ways to support these activities in a systematic way, even though there is no reference methodology yet. In reality, there is even a lack of convergence in how to appeal to this activity, which appears under different names such as outward technology transfer, discovery of white space/technology/business opportunities. The only thing that the vast majority of searches have in common is that they all use patent databases as a source of inspiration to search for new fields of application. In line with it, this paper suggests a novel patent based approach for automatize the extraction of a list of alternative technological opportunities/products. It is based on a function-based approach embedded with syntactic parsers and other natural language processing applications (NLP). They were also used to assess the different opportunities and suggest which have the greatest potential for success in the market. More specifically, specific semantic patterns have been developed to control a dependent semantic parser. Thanks to this tool we can automatically analyses the content of a huge corpus of documents training the system to recognize many technological features. This paper shows mechanisms for extracting all functions provided by a given technology, the list of products that potentially can exploit such technology and a list of requirements with which to compare products that differ in the technology used. As a result, a quantitative transfer potential index for measuring how many possibilities a given technology has of replacing an existing one is presented. Unlike many similar approaches applied to stimuli design, the method arrives at precisely suggesting the final product into which to transfer the technology and not merely suggesting a functionally related area or compatible patent class. In addition, the assessment of the replacement index is not based on distance criteria compared to the focal technology with a general purpose method, but on the contrary the judgement criteria change according to the application context. The automatic search for evaluation criteria from the specific patent content is an integral part of the method and helps to limit subjectivity in evaluations by experts in the field. However, the goodness of the results obtained is proportional to the level of knowledge of the user who interfaces to the system. Moreover, it can be universally applied to any technological context. An investigation of new application fields of heating fabrics made of carbon fiber technology is presented as exemplary case.

如今，如何发现新的商机以及如何确定值得追求的商机已成为当今许多新兴公司和公司的生存中越来越普遍和至关重要的问题，这些公司现在已经在饱和的市场中拥有成熟的技术。即使没有参考方法，学术界也一直在寻求系统地支持这些活动的方法。实际上，如何吸引这项活动甚至缺乏统一性，这种现象以不同的名称出现，例如外向技术转让，空白空间/技术/商业机会的发现。绝大多数搜索的唯一共同点是，它们都使用专利数据库作为搜索新应用领域的灵感来源。符合 本文提出了一种新颖的基于专利的方法，可以自动提取一系列替代技术机会/产品。它基于嵌入语法分析器和其他自然语言处理应用程序（NLP）的基于功能的方法。他们还被用来评估不同的机会，并提出在市场上具有最大成功潜力的机会。更具体地说，已经开发出特定的语义模式来控制从属语义解析器。借助此工具，我们可以自动分析训练系统的大量文档的内容，以识别许多技术功能。本文展示了提取给定技术提供的所有功能的机制，可能利用这种技术的产品列表，以及与所使用技术不同的产品进行比较的要求列表。结果，提出了定量转移潜力指数，用于测量给定技术替代现有技术所具有的可能性。与应用于刺激设计的许多类似方法不同，该方法可以精确地建议要向其中转移技术的最终产品，而不仅仅是建议功能相关领域或兼容的专利类别。另外，与通用技术相比，替代指标的评估不是基于与焦点技术相比的距离标准，而是相反，判断标准根据应用环境而变化。从特定专利内容自动搜索评估标准是该方法的组成部分，有助于限制本领域专家进行评估的主观性。但是，获得的结果的好坏与连接系统的用户的知识水平成正比。而且，它可以普遍应用于任何技术环境。以碳纤维技术制成的加热织物的新应用领域为例。