Identify New Application Fields of a Given Technology

The economic crisis caused by the closure of businesses forced many companies to review their business model and rethink their product catalogue. To achieve this, they need help to identify new forms of transfer of their technologies and knowledge towards newproducts. In this conference paper, the authors propose a methodology conceived as a tool to support start-ups, long before Covid-19 came along, and which is currently undergoing an important acceleration process to quickly respond to the demand of small and medium-sized companies. The objective of the proposed methodology is to analyze a given technology and to understand possible alternative fields of application to the starting one. For each new potential area there is a complex evaluation that tries to position the product according to technical and economic parameters. At the basis of the methodology there are the most modern tools of Information Retrieval: SAO (Subject Action Object) triads and algorithmic approaches based on patterns recognition. The combination of these two approaches, no antithetical to each other, forms the basis of the methodological proposal of this paper. They are used to automatically analyze large patent pools and extract features of technological nature such as functions, product requirements and fields of application. Once the list of potential fields has been extracted, it is possible to assess the potential impact and investment risk by introducing other key tools developed by the TRIZ community, such as market potential. In order to make the methodological process more fluid, specific indicators have been created, such as the Transfer Potential, which indicates the replacement potential of a new technology compared to an old one. The proposed approach is tested through an explanatory industrial case study.